I’ve heard more than a few of you Newt and Paul supporters out there; “If Romney wins, I’m staying home on election day”.

While I’m not especially passionate about Romney just yet, I’ll reiterate what an awful idea this is.  Don’t go there, people.

I’ve got ten suggestions for much more-productive responses.

1. Keep things in perspective - Forget Gingrich’s Alinskiite rhetoric for a moment; Romney’s not a “liberal”.  Remember William F. Buckley’s advice – “Vote for the most conservative person who can win?”  Romney was the most conservative person who could win…in Massachusetts.  He was the most conservative person who could make any headway against a Massachusetts legislature that made Ted Kennedy look like Michele Bachmann.  Is he the most conservative candidate who could win in a nationwide general election?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  But if not?  We’ll come back to that.  The point being, he’s not just “not a liberal” – on economics, which is what really matters in this election, he’s conservative enough.  And for the rest?  Well, we’ll get back to that down the list a ways.
2. Relax.  Take a deep breath.  The world doesn’t begin or end with this nomination.  Or even with this election. Even if Romney is as bad as some of you claim, this nation has survived worse.  Hell, we’re surviving worse right now.  Focus, people; getting Obama out of office is the key – and while some of you reject incrementalism (and I reject the idea that Romney is especially incremental, and even if he is – well, we’ll get back to that below), sometimes it’s all you got, and you gotta deal with it, and when you gotta deal with it, you want the increments to move in the right direction.  Romney’s not perfect, but he’s the right direction – and, I suggest, not just a little.
3. Remember The Positive Influence You Do Have - The caucuses and primaries aren’t over.  We’re seven months away from the convention – and three months away from the state conventions that will empanel the delegates.  This isn’t a done deal yet.  I can live with Romney – maybe even better – but I’m caucusing for…I dunno, probably Santorum on Tuesday.  Not that I’m thrilled with Santorum, either, but I want Mitt and his supporters to know that to win me (and, I hope, millions like me) that he’s going to have to be more aggressively conservative than he has been acting.
4. Go Shooting. It’s great stress relief.  It focuses the mind.  And it shows Romney – and Obama – that you can’t whiz on the Second Amendment.  It’s a threefer.
5. Remember The Alternative - You think four more years of Obama would be better than four to eight of Romney?  There’s a caveat to this, of course – more below.
6. No, Remember The Real Alternative  - I hear those among you who say you’ll sit this election out.  ”If the party loses because they didn’t go conservative enough for me, it’ll teach them a lesson”.   That’s not only groaningly solipsistic – it’s not, after all, all about you – it’s also just not the way political parties and organizations work.  I’ve said it a few times in the past few weeks, and I’m going to keep saying it until y’all get it right; Political parties don’t “learn lessons” – they reflect the will of those who show up.  And if conservatives – and all you libertarian Ron Paul supporters – don’t show up, then the “establishment wins.  And don’t be yapping about “voting Libertarian”, because…
7. Third Parties Are to “Parties” What Near Beer Is To Beer. Let’s be honest; if you are a conservative or a libertarian, the GOP is the only chance you have to actually affect policy for real.  The Libertarian, Constitution and Conservative parties are futile, vote-wasting protest actions at best,  intellectual onanism at worst.  None of them will ever, ever, ever, ever affect the way policy is enacted in this country.  Ever.  And I say that as someone who not only sincerely wishes they could, but worked for it as a Libertarian Party member.  And remember – you, the conservative and libertarian and Tea Partier, have had a huge effect already; four years ago, Romney was defending himself against charges he was “too conservative”; today, it’s the opposite.  This is a good thing.  You – we – have moved the needle in the GOP.  ”But it hasn’t moved far enough and fast enough!”, you say?  Suck it up, little camper, and put down the TV remote; political parties don’t change like one of those jump cuts in an NFL game of the week.  It takes time, patience and effort.  Hell, it took Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater close to 20 years to change the GOP, and even that didn’t stick.
8. Be Honest: Campaign rhetoric is one thing – real records, and their context, are much more useful.  Romney needs to be kept honest – i.e, conservative – and we have the power to do that (see, again, below), but it’s not like we’re trying to reform Che Guevara, here.
9. Numbers Count:  Remember Buckley’s Commandment from earlier in the post?  ”Elect the most conservative candidate who can win?”  Newt’s negatives shouldn’t be the dispositive factor in this nomination, but you might wanna be mindful of the fact that 60% of the American people would rather have Slobodan Milosevic for President.  And Ron Paul is a shoe-in in the4 general – so say his supporters.  Who are, so far, 1/6-1/10 of the GOP.  If he can’t win the GOP, I’m at a loss for how he has even a faint shot at the general.  I’d love to hear a Ronulan spell out a case that leads Paul to the White House that doesn’t include the phrase “and then Ron Paul convinces everyone that he’s ideal”.  Honestly – I’d love to hear it.  Rand Paul might be another story, and there, I’m all ears - but that’s the future.  As far as I”m concerned, for right now the electoral world ends in November.  Focus.
10. Checks, Balances. So what if the GOP had no candidate at all, and we were looking at a victory for Obama by default today?  What would you be doing now, all you good conservatives?  Working to make sure the conservatives hold the House and take the Senate?  OK – so let’s say Romney really is as bad as  you all want us to believe he is.  And let’s say he’s inevitable.  Your choices then are “stay home” or “do what you’d do if Obama was going to win – try to negate his power and influence by taking control of Congress”.  Why, precisely, should you not then be working to flip the Senate and extend our lead in the House/  Because the opportunity is there, folks, to not just flip Congress completely against either Obama or a hypothetical “moderate” Romney, but flip it to a version of the GOP that, so far, has been pretty Beltway-proof, and fairly dedicated to the mission for which they were sent to GOP by the Tea Party and a newly-resurgent conservative movement in the first place; togovern like conservatives.  Keeping them that way is our job.  Provided we don’t “stay home” and “teach everyone a lesson”.  Because the only “lesson” you “teach” by staying home is that you’re unreliable and marginal.  Don’t be that.

Here’s my video record of life in the occupation zone:

The plaintiveness with which the protesters seem to beg to be arrested is almost heart-rending.  Unfortunately for them, the Minneapolis Police and the Hennepin County Sheriffs aren’t obliging them; they confiscated the tents (shown in the video) without making any arrests, prompting the protesters to start to roam the Twin Cities looking for places that’ll raise some dudgeon, even as the media belatedly starts to wonder if there’s a story, here.

I almost feel like the video will be a collector’s item soon.

The proceedings had a wide variety of keynote speakers – including Michael Reagan, son of the 40th President – and, in a first, one presidential candidate, Herman Cain, who followed Reagan via Skype.  Projected at the crowd via the big-screen TVs in the Grand Ballroom at the Bloomington Doubletree, Cain talked ran down the list of crises facing this country – culminating in the greatest crisis of all, a leadership crisis.

And then, the conference concluded with its first-ever straw poll.

And here are the results, in ascending order:

• 0.2% Johnson
• 0.9% Huntsman
• 2% Santorum
• 3.3% Gingrich
• 4% Rick Perry
• 10.7% Paul
• 11.1% Romney
• 12.2% Bachmann
• 52.6% Herman Cain!

“TPaw” is an engaging guy, a  natural politician – which is both a positive and a negative – and very, very underrated as a stump speaker.  And I thought he had a great shot at winning the White House, had he gotten the nomination.  All the polls show that a “Generic Republican” would trounce Barack Obama if an election were held today – and Tim Pawlenty spent his whole campaign trying to set himself up as that generic conservative Republican.

But as Jazz and Ed noted, he could not get the nomination – or, more accurately, it looked unlikely that he’d be able to scare up enough donors to fund a continued race against the rest of the pack.  ”Generic Republican” was the wrong brand in a year when the GOP straw-poll-voting base wanted red, principled meat

I think TPaw battled a couple of misconceptions.  The one from the left – that he left Minnesota with a “Six Billion Dollar Deficit” – is the easiest to dispatch.  TPaw left the state with a small operating surplus and a DFL-dominated bureaucracy that, as he left office, demanded six billion dollars more than the state was taking in at the time.  It was aforecast, not a budget.  It was of no weight whatsoever – not that that mattered to the media, who waved the figure around as if it was a hard budget number.   Pawlenty also left the state with among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.

Harder to tackle is the flak he took from the right.  Sue Jeffers – a friend and fellow MN CD4 activist, who hosts a show at the lesser Twin Cities conservative talk station, and who mounted a primary challenge form the right against the incumbent Pawlenty in 2006 – insists that Pawlenty was a “RINO”, because of a variety of policies that were, by conservative standards, miscues; his support of a state version of “cap and trade” (which failed to pass), his flirtation with the global warming orthodoxy, his “health impact fee” and a few other issues.  If you were a Sullivan supporter in 2002 – and I was – then he was not the governor you wanted.

But he was the governor we got, as opposed to DFL nominees Roger Moe (2002) or Mike Hatch (2006).  Thank God.  And while Pawlenty squibbed on several hottish-button conservative issues, he held the line on the bigdaddy animalmotha of them all; taxes and the budget.  Not perfectly – but then, he faced a divided legislature until 2006, and an entirely DFL legislature, and an executive branch in which he and his lieutenant governor were the sole GOP elected officials, since then.

And yet he did an admirable job of holding the line on the budget for those four years, outmaneuvering the DFL to the point that they basically spun themselves into near-irrelevance in the process (the DFL endorsement is basically the kiss of death in Minnesota, and for their current chairman they had to import the chair of a “progressive” attack-PAC), and taking the path of greatest resistance; if he were a “moderate”, giving way on taxes would have been the easy route.

And yet he didn’t; he vetoed the DFL’s tax hikes every chance he got, succumbing only to the perfidy of the “Override Six”.

So he wasn’t the perfect governor, but he was paw-lenty good enough.

(Sue hates when I say that.  ”It’s that kind of thinking that got us into trouble” during the Bush years.  There’s a point to that.  But go ahead, go down the road of uncompromising purism; wave “hi” to the Libertarians and the Greens on your way past!  The solution, of course, is to make sure “good enough” really is good enough – which is what we’re doing right now, in every GOP precinct in the US.  And at the presidential level, I’m feeling a lot better about things now than I have in decades; if you remember the Bob Dole coronation, and years when the most conservative candidate we had was dark-hose Steve Forbes, then you should oughtta be thanking your lucky stars for the field we have).

Will TPaw run for Senate against Amy “A-Klo” Klobuchar, or sit on the sidelines and build up a war chest to run againstAl ” Stuart Smalley’ Franken?  It’s a tough call; Franken’s a much weaker candidate (remember his 300-vote margin of “victory” in 2008, on Obama’s coat-tails and in a terrible year for the GOP?), but right now Hooters waitresses have longer coattails than Barack Obama; the iron may be hot for the striking now.  The state GOP thinks so: chairman Tony Sutton is already talking”Pawlenty For Senate”.

Either way, I hope he does.  I don’t think he got his due in this presidential race.

Cross-posted from Shot In The Dark.

To which I answer, as appropriate, “what did you expect when we only control the House?” and “if you’re not storing gold, ammo and food even in the good times, you’re nuts”.  But I digress.

Ed Morrissey – with whom I co-host a radio show every Saturday on AM1280 - notes inThe Week that it wasn’t a perfect victory for the Tea Party – there was no way for that victory to happen, at least not via democratic means, in this Congress with this President – but it was a victory nevertheless:

Who won, and who lost? Did anyone win? If we gauge winners and losers by the reaction from politicians and activists across the political spectrum, no one was satisfied with the deal reached between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress and President Obama. Though it is arguably true that few actually advanced their agenda much in the deal, that doesn’t mean everyone came out of this deal equally worse off. Indeed, despite some dissatisfied rumblings from within the Tea Party, one lesson is clear: They succeeded in transforming Washington.

The codecil to that – one that the Tea Party needs to remember?  Politics is not like a championship game, with a final end result that stands for all time.  It’s a season – one that never actually ends.  It’s one where everything that happens in this game – hurt quarterbacks, momentum gained and lost, everything - affects the next game, and the game after that, and games played after your children take things over.

The example I keep coming back to: handgun carry reform in Minnesota.  When Concealed Carry Reform Now first formed, and started trying to change Minnesota’s racist, sexist, patriarchal weapon carry laws, they couldn’t even get time to talk with legislators – with “friendly”, Republican ones.

I can’t help but feel that some of the Tea Party conservatives who are complaining about the debt ceiling deal today would have fumed about the unfairness of it all back then, thrown in the towel and spent the next six years silently stewing.  But I’d hope it’d be a teaching moment.

Because the next year…well, only a few legislators talked with CCRN.  But it was more than the previous year.  And CCRN’s mailing list bloomed, and outstate voters started paying attention.

And the next year?  A few more legislators opened their doors.  And CCRN’s mailing list started having an effect – legislators started hearing from more people, which opened still more doors.

And the next year?  There was talk of a bill.  It never happened, but legislators were getting the message in droves; CCRN’s volunteer lobbyists were getting audiences with key legislators.

And the next year?  Well, the CCRN mailing list grew some more, and the DFL had to start playing defense.

And the next year?  And the following?  More of the same.  The DFL – and their point man on the issue, Wes “Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund – had to crank the smear and lie machine up into full force, since it was becoming clear they had no basis in fact.

And the next year?  There was a bill – and it died on the table (as I recall – I could very well have the specifics wrong, but it doesn’t really detract from the point).  And CCRN’s mailing list told voters which legislators voted against it.  And they got an earful, and a few of them – outstate DFLers who’d voted against the bill – lost their return tickets to Saint Paul.

And the next year?  We won.

(And two years later, we won again, after a DFL-pet judge struck down the law on ludicrously selective grounds).

Viewed from the perspective of 1995, and 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, we lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost and lost again.

And yet without all the effort – and there was a lot of effort – expended from 1005 through 2002, there would have been no victory.

And the victory wasn’t won by simply wanting it badly enough – although you gotta have that.  It was won by playing grassroots politics better than the other side.  We – the pro-Second-Amendment movement – had to win over a lot of hearts and minds in the legislature, the media, and on Mainstreet Minnesota.

The Tea Party did transform American politics – once. It did it by convincing the American people last Fall that they had the best ideas for taking this nation forward.

And now they need to do it again – to win the Senate, the White House, and a bunch of State Houses and Legislatures, enough to really, seriously, totally revamp the way this nation views the relationship between The People and government.

And it’s not a sprint, or a single game; it’s a marathon, an endless season.  Something that’ll challenge many Americans’ addled attention spans.

All the better.

Originally posted at Shot In The Dark.

Reagan did not start an era of unprecedented growth by any measure: employment, GDP, productivity, whatever. But maybe the easiest way to see what didn’t happen is to look at median family income in constant dollars:

The NYTimes helpfully provided a graph:

Krugman:

A spectacular increase during the high-tax, strong-union postwar generation; fitful improvement since, with the only sustained rise during the Clinton years. That’s the story; it’s amazing how many people don’t know it.

“That’s the story” Krugman says; high taxes (and unions, he adds in a non-sequitur) cause prosperity.

Like household income exists in a vacuum, affected only by taxes (and union membership).

I’m tempted to drive to New York, collar Krugman, and ask ”what else happened during this timeline?”

What else happened between 1947 and 1971, besides unfettered taxes and government growth?  Like, the German and Japanese economies starting the period in ruins, and spending the entire period rebuilding?  China and India starting as third-world countries, enduring forty years of socialist governments that couldn’t feed their own people?  And, respectively, a mass-murdering socialist dictatorship and civil wars?

Did Germany and Japan only get their economies rebuilt, and start to seriously compete with the US, in the late sixties and early seventies – about the time America’s rise in income leveled off?

Did America’s unions develop their high-salary, high-benefit, often low-skill paradigm perhaps because America’s economy had no competition?  The whole world was America’s market for those 25 years!

(And when Germany and Japan’s economies took off, they adopted high-tax, high-”service”, strong-union systems.  And when did their performance start levelling off?

That’s right, it shot up like a rocket from reconstruction until 1990…

…until China and India and Taiwan and the Republic of Korea started performing.

But don’t mind that.  According to “nobel-prize-winning” economist Paul Krugman, none of that matters.  Just taxes.

Media academics:  Distrust, then verify. Then, usually, distrust some more.

And so when the unions can find a hidden trove of tens of thousands of workers that can be unionized in one fell swoop, it’s like candy at Christmas.

The proposed merger between ATT and TMobile will release just such a stockpile of fresh potential dues-paying recruits.  ATT is unionized; TMobile is not, but being the absorbed entity, its employees – 20,000 of them – would be potential union recruits.

That’s a lot of money.

And the unions knew it.  And so the unions – almost all the big ones – aggressively lobbied the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve the merger.  The record is long and ornate; the unions really, really wanted this deal.

Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO., sounded off when the news of the proposed merger broke:  “Yesterday’s announcement of the acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T hasimportant, positive implications for consumers in the U.S. and Germany, forthe U.S. telecom workforce and for our country’s economic future. The acquisition ensures AT&T a strong telecom workforce well-positioned tocompete globally, while offering tens of thousands of T-Mobile USA employees the opportunity to make their jobs good jobs by benefitting from the pro-worker policies of AT&T, one of the only unionized U.S. wireless companies”

The AFL-CIO’s house blog was similarly effusive: ““The announcement over the weekend that AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA could benefit both consumers and employees”

And Larry Cohen, President, Communications Workers of America. also spoke up: “For more than a decade, the United States has continued to drop behind nearly every other developed economy on broadband speed and build out. The Federal Communications Commission sounded the alarm more than a year ago with its broadband report, and President Obama in his State of th eUnion address called for increased efforts to bring the U.S. back to global parity as a key stimulus for economic development. Today’s announcement of the acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T is  avictory for broadband proponents in both the U.S. and Germany. For the U.S.,it means that T-Mobile customers will get quick access to the AT&T network,soon to include LTE or data speeds of at least 10 megabits down stream.More important, as part of the deal, AT&T is committing to build out to nearly every part of the U.S. within six years”    Bear in mind that Cohen and the CWA are not cheerleaders for big telecoms; they’ve fought a long, losing battle with Sprint over their practice of contracting out labor, rather than hiring expensive union employees and taking on their pension burden.

Last month, Philip Qualy, legislative director of the Minnesota United Transportation Union’s mailed the FCC’s Julius Genachowski to support the merger; you can read the letter here.  Ditto Shar Knutson and Steve Hunter, from the MN AFL-CIO.  And Julie Schnell, President of the SEIU’s Minnesota State Council; while the SEIU is reliably in bed with the Democrats and the DFL, they know money when they see it.

And Edward Reynoso, political director of the Teamsters’ “Democratic Republican Independent Voter Education” (DRIVE) project, who estimated the long-term upside for the unions, and the private economy, at up to 96,000 jobs.  Not to mention Mona Meyer, president of the Minnesota Communications Workers of America, the union that’d be mostaffected by the merger.

There is no doubt that labor has close ties with Democrats in Congress.  A list of eighty members of the House of Representatives – including Betty McCollum, of Minnesota’s Fourth Congressional District, signed a letter to the FCC also supporting the merger.

So it’s a big deal for the unions.

And as such, it should be a big deal for Democrat – right?

———-

Last Wednesday, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl recommended that the FCC spike the almost-$40-billion deal:

”I have concluded that this acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies,” Kohl said [last] Wednesday.

The unions seemed flabbergasted.  Candice Johnson, communications director for the Communications Workers of America, wrote to tell the FCC that no, they were not amused:

CWA Response to Kohl Letter 7 20

So why did Al Franken leave his union supporters at the altar to go do the nutroots bidding? And what does this mean for Al Franken, for  you private sector union people out there,and for the country?

More tomorrow.

How far will Republican lawmakers go to protect millionaires? Those who think a default on the federal government’s credit seems implausible should take a sobering look at the “closed” signs dotting Minnesota. The Republican Party there readily shut down the state’s government on Friday by refusing to raise taxes on the 7,700 Minnesotans who make more than $1 million a year.

Well, no.

The GOP refused to raise taxes.  Period.  Dayton chose to make it about “millionaires”, and before that “the rich”.  Had Dayton chosen to raise, say, the gas tax (like the DFL majority in 2009 did), a terribly regressive tax that squats all over working-class prosperity, the GOP would have opposed that, as well.

For the Times to turn the GOP’s opposition to a tax into ”protecting millionaires” is a craven bit of rhetorical dishonesty.

Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, campaigned for office last year promising to raise taxes on high earners, so it was no surprise when he proposed a tax increase on families making more than $150,000 a year to help close a $5 billion budget gap. In negotiations with the Republican majority in the Legislature, he compromised and reduced the increase to those making $1 million or more, but Republicans are refusing to consider any income tax increase.

Note the rhetoric: Dayton keeping a campaign promise?  Good.  The GOP? Can’t be good, can it?

Like Republicans in Washington, they have the delusion that they can balance the budget entirely from cuts.

The Times’ “editorial” was apparently written by the MNDFL’s chair, Ken Martin.  The GOP budget is the biggest spending increase in Minnesota history.

The governor proposed more than $2 billion in cuts but refused to slash billions more from education, health care and public safety programs.

All of which the GOP compromised on, meeting Dayton much more than halfway.

The Legislature also wanted new abortion restrictions and a voter ID law that Mr. Dayton had already vetoed. When he said no, lawmakers allowed the fiscal year to end without a budget, and state government officially shut on July 1.

The Times apparently believes the GOP should “negotiate” like a Saturn dealer; start with their “final offer” and work backward from there.

Also unmentioned by “the Times” editorial writer: Dayton walked out of the negotiations every time.  The GOP Legislature was waiting in the Capitol, ready to negotiate and/or pass a “lights on” bill, to keep govermment running

More than 40 state agencies have closed, including the state parks over the July Fourth holiday. Courts and public safety agencies are operating, but essential services for the poor, like food pantries and child care subsidies, have evaporated. Many parents say they may have to quit their jobs if state-subsidized child care does not resume quickly. The shutdown will cost the state money, since many of the 22,000 laid-off workers will receive unemployment benefits and health insurance, while the treasury is unable to collect on tax audits, lottery tickets and park fees.

Unmentioned by the Times (or any of the Twin Cities media); the evidence is overwhelming that Governor Dayton rigged the shutdown to cause as much pain as possible, specifically to drive those dependent on state employment or services to try to push moderate Republicans into wobbling.

As painful as the closure may become, the governor is right not to yield to the extremist ideology the Republicans are pursuing in St. Paul, Washington and across the country.

“Extremist ideology”.

The GOP ran very openly on a platform of holding the line on taxes and spending.  Perhaps you remember the Tea Party – it was in all the papers, including the Times.

Extremist?  Governor Dayton won with 43% of the vote; the GOP majorities had, by definition, over 50% of the state’s voters pick them (since the third-party challenges were virtually nonexistant in legislative races in 2010).  Can a policy chosen by over half the voters be “extemist?”

Governor Dayton dismissed the bill as a “stunt”.

Here’s Governor Dayton, not “stunting”:

At the Alexandra House, a women’s shelter in Blaine that depends on state money, executive director Connie Moore has begun spending the shelter’s savings to keep the doors open. The desperate move won’t buy much time.

“We’re gambling right now,” Moore said. “If we don’t get reimbursed, the impact will be long-lived.”

The GOP’s “stunt” would have kept Alexandra House operating and solvent.

Governor Dayton tossed that aside to protect…AFSCME’s ability to retire at 55 with full taxpayer support?

In St. Paul, Rhonda Nelson, who is deaf and blnd, just lost her eyes and ears to the world. The aide who helps her go grocery shopping, to doctor’s appointments, to the post office and other appointments has been deemed non-essential in the state government shutdown.

For someone who already spends most of her days in dark silence, losing the service is heartbreaking. “I’m basically stuck at home,” said Nelson, 65, a former disabilities educator from St. Paul, speaking through an interpreter.

The GOP’s “stunt” would have kept Ms. Nelson’s eyes and ears, as it were, functioning.

Dayton sacrificed Ms. Nelson’s eyes and ears to…what?  Chastise entrepreneurs.

Programs that help get families out of homeless shelters, allow single parents to stay in the workforce, provide safe havens for battered women and allow those with disabilities to enjoy everyday life have suddenly lost funding and are teetering on the edge of closure.

The GOP’s “stunt” would have fixed that, while the negotiations continued.

Dayton couldn’t have that.

Ryan Lyk of the Minnesota College Republicans snapped this shot – of someone in a Minnesota Association of Professional Employees T-shirt – at the demonstrations around the Minnesota State Capitol last night.

Ryan has his account of the evening over at the MNCR’s blog.

A little later, a group of individuals in wheelchairs started yelling at us and telling us that we were “killing” disabled, homeless, and sick people. The police shut them down, but it just got worse from there. A little while later, a man came up to us and said “history will repeat itself and all of your heads will be cut off.”

The unions are pretty classy, aren’t they?

This was really just the tip of the iceberg. We had people poking our eyes with umbrellas, having their 8 year old children trying to cover up our signs, trying to push us and stifle our free speech, flicking us off, cussing at us, antagonizing us, harassing us… the list goes on and on.

What is truly important, though, is that throughout the entire night, we stood strong and stayed above the fray. We never worked to stifle the oppositions free speech, we never threatened them, and we were never disrespectful.

Of course, to plenty on the left, conservatives’ existence is taken as a sign of “disrespect”.  That was certainly the vibe out at the Capitol last night.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark, where Mitch Berg also wrote about his night at the demonstrations at the State Capitol.

As re the Bin Laden photos:

1. Obama, citing perfectly valid security and moral concerns, will decline to release photos of a dead Bin Laden. (CHECK)
2. The media will devote slavish news coverage to the tiny fringe of conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers that question the “Bin Laden is Dead” story (studiously ignoring any leftists who do), and giving obsessive coverage to “polls” (that will, inevitably, present “questions” as “doubts”), making a tiny non-story into a “story”.  Absent any empirical evidence of a significant trend (other than giving premium air time to a few highly-placed doubters – see Orly Taitz), the mainstream media will build a potemkin trend – purely to discredit conservatives.  Read: “purely to discredit Obama’s opposition”.
3. This coverage will rise to a crescendo right around the time a GOP nominee starts to push for some traction against the incumbent, right about the time non-wonks and non-news-junkies start paying attention to the election; figure around Labor Day, 2012.
4. Look for the pictures to be released (via an elaborate leak – maybe Wikileaks or something similar) about a week after that crescendo.

“Gosh, Berg, you’re cynical”.

As re the relationship between the Democrats and the mainstream media, “cynicism” is just another word for “Zen-like perfect awareness”.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Few of the Democrats’ 9/11 memes irritated me more over the years than the one in which Michael Moore cavorted and romped like an obese sweaty pixie for all these years; that George W. Bush was distracted and incompetent because after he got the news about 9/11, he finished reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of first-graders…

…while his staff frantically figured out what was going on.

The kids to whom he read – now juniors in high school – are finally getting their say:

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Florida.

Seven-year-olds can’t understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult’s face is telling them something is very wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels’ class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the sudden, devastated change in Bush’s expression when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the Al Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq’s heart started racing because he assumed they were all in big trouble — with no less than the Commander-in-Chief — but he wasn’t quite sure why. “In a heartbeat he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified,” recalls Dubrocq, now 17. “I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?”

I’ve always felt – with good reason – that the Democrats who ragged on Bush for finishing the story also believed that government works like an episode of  West Wing or 24; that omnipotently competent bureaucrats always have instant real-life knowedge of everything that goes on around them, that they can zoom in on everything that happens across the land and instantly make perfectly-calibrated decisions.

Real life, even at the highest level of government, isn’t like that.  Especially when an unprecedented situation like 9/11 is breaking out.  Nobody in the Federal Government knew what was going on on 9/11, and it showed; at one point there were reports of as many as six hijackings, and a bomb blast at the State Department, among many others.

And one of the things a leader does is keep things in perspective while chaos is breaking out all around him.

All sorts of similar kid fears started running through Mariah Williams’ head. “I don’t remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs?” says Williams, 16. “But I’ll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just seven. I’m just glad he didn’t get up and leave because then I would have been more scared and confused.” Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees: even today she’s grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. “I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out,” says Guerrero, “so we all wouldn’t freak out.”

I’ve often wondered – what did the Dems think the President was supposed to do in the opening seconds of the war?  Jump up, run to the Presidential limo, and order an attack on…someone, somewhere?  Tell NORAD to scramble planes (they do that on their own, although on 9/11 they weren’t equipped to track aircraft inside the US)?

Or keep his composure and not send everyone around him – a classroom full of first-graders – into a blind panic until he actually had something to act on?

Even if they didn’t freak out, it’s apparent that sharing the terrifying Tuesday of 9/11 with Bush has affected those second-graders in the decade since — and, they say, made the news of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos on Sunday all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts he’d be a student in the rigorous IB, or international baccalaureate program, if he hadn’t been with the President as one of history’s most infamous global events unfolded. “Because of that,” he says, “I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place, and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good.”

The whole piece is worth a read.

A pity Time magazine couldn’t have run it, say, six years ago…

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

From: Mitch Berg, Cheesed-Off Conservative

Re: Get off the can, get on the stick.

Senators,

I get the need for compromise.

I get the fact that the Democrats still control the Senate, and they’re not going to get their way for the asking.

I get that.

What I do not get is how none of you establishment Republicans ever seems to learn from history.    It was six  years ago when you had a majority, and a sitting President, and you – many of you occupying space in the Senate right now – blinked, and gave the Democrat minority everything they wanted – a legislative Manhattan, in exchange for some meaningless procedural trinkets.

And you’re doing it again, cutting a “deal” with the President to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for a vote on a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment.

A vote.

Erick Erickson (with emphasis added by me):

The GOP is not telling the Democrats they actually want the Balanced Budget Amendment, just a vote. This is wholly unacceptable. If Barack Obama wants to increase the debt ceiling, the GOP should go all or nothing — they must have their Balanced Budget Amendment in exchange for it. A vote is utter nonsense without a commitment from the Democrats to pass it by a two-thirds vote from both Houses.

But it gets more insane from there. Everything we feared, everything we knew would happen, is coming to fruition.

Why?

Because you, the “Senate GOP Leadership”, the ones who’ve been there forever, fear another government shutdown.  You remember – and have created a mid-level “leadership” that remembers – how badly the last shutdown cost you at the polls.

But that was in the cha-cha nineties, when things were generally awesome and the greatest crisis facing this nation was a lothario President, when the stock market was booming and people were generally fat ‘n happy, and the media was only too happy to tell them so.

But – I’ll emphasize this – it’s 2011 now.  The Obama Recession is underway.  A vast movement of Americans has had enough.  They reversed the Obamascenscion and put your – our – party back in power twenty years earlier than anyone thought it would be possible in 2009.  Because we are that pissed off!  There is a blogosphere, and talk radio, and Fox News; the mainstream media don’t have the stage all to themselves.  We can control our own narrative this time - if you are bold enough to seize the opportunity.

You, the “leadership”, apparently don’t get that.  Erickson (again, emphasis added):

Why? Because the GOP is finally being forced by the base to push for actual, substantive spending cuts instead of the death by a thousand paper cuts strategy of the leadership…Luckily for us, conservatives made such a stink about the last short term CR being, in fact, the last short term CR, the GOP is now forced to be a leader. The leaders are, however, reluctant.

Look, it is very simple — demand passage of a balanced budget amendment, defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and if the Democrats balk, shut the government down.

Unfortunately for you and me, the GOP leadership is scared to death of and hell bent on avoiding a government shutdown. They may have no choice, so they better get ready.

Look – here’s the deal; we sent you there to kick ass, and kick Ass.  We sent you there to repeal Obamacare, to slash spending, to roll back tax hikes.

And we – the people who sent you to Washington in the greatest electoral turnaround in decades – are hungry for exactly that.

And if you don’t have the cojones to do the job, we will send someone to DC that does.

Cut the budget.  Shut down the government if you need to.  We’ll be there if you do.  The situation is different than in the nineties;  the media that covered the Democrats’ behinds back then doesn’t have a complete stranglehold now.  So do it.  Do what we sent you there to do.

And if you don’t?  You can join your constituents on the unemployment line.  Soon.

Do it.

That is all.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

So far, anyway.

He left it to Pawlenty to sum up the crux of his legacy:

“This is a state that was on a spending binge for a long time with a liberal-leaning political culture that goes back decades or generations, and to try to change the direction of the state was a big undertaking. But I think we did that,” Pawlenty said during an extended interview Tuesday with a group of Capitol reporters.

Making that change was not easy, the Republican governor said. He had to call a predominantly Democratic Legislature into special sessions, issue a record number of vetoes in one year and use a government shutdown to force the changes.

“This will be known as the time Minnesota finally came to terms with its excesses and got itself on a more sustainable and responsible path,” he said.

That legacy, he asserted, is more significant than any new program or building he might have created.

Pawlenty’s right – and in ways the article isn’t scoped to explore, in and of itself.

Not only did Pawlenty’s years start the process of breaking the state of the culture of “the people exist to keep the government fed” school of government, but he set the stage for this years’ GOP sweep (Republicans flipped control of both chambers of the Minnesota legislature, controlling the body for the first time in recent history) in ways that I don’t think he’ll get credit for – even among conservatives.

Maybe especially among conservatives.

Until 1998, the Minnesota GOP was a “moderate”, even “progressive” party.  James Lileks once joked on the radio, around the time he lived in or came back from DC, that he’d tell his friends in Washington “Minnesota is the place where you have your pro-abortion, pro-gun-control candidate – and the Democrat!”.

Former MN governor Arne Carlson (who served from 1990-1998) was a typical pre-Pawlenty Republican.  In many respects, he was a bigger “liberal” than the DFLer he replaced, Rudy Perpich, and he was hardly alone.  The GOP during the “Independent Republican” era – the years after Watergate, when the MNGOP rechristened itself the “Independent Republican” party, to break with the national GOP – was a throwback to the national GOP of the Eisenhower years, which was vastly more “communitarian” than libertarian or fiscally conservative.

And there are plenty who wanted, and still want, the GOP to remain that party – basically DFLers with better suits; a party that believed “Fiscal Responsibility” meant making sure you tax enough to run government…

…but that keeping government fed and fat and happy came first and foremost among government’s  missions.

And, predictably, there are many in the Minnesota’s GOP who pine for the old days:

But a lot of Pawlenty’s financial savings were “smoke and mirrors” instead of permanent cost reductions, said John Gunyou, finance commissioner under former Gov. Arne Carlson’s and a DFL candidate for lieutenant governor this year. Pawlenty relied heavily on delaying payments, raiding funds set aside for other purposes, unilateral spending cuts that the state Supreme Court ruled overstepped his authority and federal stimulus funds.

“He didn’t really bring costs under control,” Gunyou said.

Unmentioned by Gunyou – or any of the other outdated impedimenta, “GOP” or DFL, that keep repeating that particular chanting point – is that Pawlenty was hamstrung throughout his eight years, for four years by a DFL-controlled Senate and a GOP majority in the House that was addled by too many old-school, “IR”-era Republicans to do much more than hold the line on spending – which he did! – and for the last half of his administration by facing a rapacious, money-crazed DFL majority in both chambers of the legislature.  Against such grossly, irresponsibly, blindly spenthrift ideologues as Larry Pogemiller, Margaret Kelliher, Sandy Pappas and the rest of the Twin Cities metro-area DFL clacque that ran the Legislature, the only way to meet his statutory responsibility to balance the budget and keep his “no new taxes” pledge was to defer that which he couldn’t cut.

Pawlenty will leave his successor, Democrat Mark Dayton, with a projected $6.2 billion budget deficit.

Well, no – the Legislature did, and the 6.2 billion number is a made-up figure with no legal meaning, but the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) don’t want you to know that.

But I digress.

Salisbury turned to talk of Pawlenty’s legacy.  In discussing the big takeaways from Pawlenty’s eight years, a group of assembled poli-sci wonks phumphered that Pawlenty didn’t leave much in the way of “big achievements”:  the inevitable quote from U of Minnesota poli-sci professor Larry Jacobs was “Huge promise, remarkable intelligence and understanding of the issues but uneven or limp follow-through”.  Salisbury points out that Pawlenty “…was excellent at diagnosing problems and generating ideas, such has providing health care for all kids or funding transportation projects after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed. But he dropped many of his creative ideas, often because they would have cost more tax dollars, which his conservative base opposed”

The observation is partly right.  The part they miss; conservatives were never “his” “base”, where “base” means “people who ideologically support him through thick and thin”.  Pawlenty came into the governor’s race as the moderate.  He had to earn every conservative vote he got, starting at the 2002 GOP convention, where he held off a charge by conservative businessman Brian Sullivan after 17 ballots, largely by adopting the conservative Taxpayers League of Minnesota’s “No New Taxes” pledge – pledging to balance the budget by controlling spending rather than hiking taxes.  In many ways, Pawlenty never entirely won conservatives over;  he still hasn’t entirely won “conservatives” over, although I believe that, being as perfect is the enemy of good enough, he should have.  I believe Minnesota’s conservatives shorted Pawlenty.

Poli-sci prof Steven Schier from Carlton College provides the key caveat that the U of M’s Jacobs didn’t, pointing out that Pawlenty “never had a fully cooperative Legislature”.  That’s putting it lightly.  When the DFL took complete control of the Legislature in 2006, DFL Senator Cy Thao famously remarked “When you people [Republicans] win, you get to keep your money; when we win, we take your money!”.  Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller said in 2008 “it’s silly to think that people can spend their money better than government can”.

So when Salisbury quotes Jacobs…:

A governor must build coalitions to get things done, Jacobs said, but Pawlenty had a hard time finding “honorable compromise” with DFL legislators.

…one can forgive him for not adding “because the DFL had no interest in compromise, and were largely not honorable”.

But I will.

My real point is that Pawlenty’s legacy goes waaaay beyond simple, material things like programs and departments and government real estate.  Tim Pawlenty did something that’s needed doing since long before I came to Minnesota.  Because for all of my hard-core paleocon friends’ grousing about “impact fees” and “travelling with Will Steger”, it’s a simple fact that Pawlenty’s political leadership helped drive the Minnesota GOP to the right; it helped the GOP provide a real policy alternative to the DFL for the first time in recent memory.

Pawlenty was the first important political figure in recent Minnesota political history to define “fiscal responsibility” as “controlling spending” rather than “making sure we make the people cover all of government’s bills on time!”.

I think there’s a pretty airtight case that Tim Pawlenty is the most vital, transformative figure in Minnesota politics since Hubert H. Humphrey.

The leadership of the Tea Party, and of Minnesota’s newly-empowered conservative legislative majority, might quibble with the statement, but in every way that mattered, Tim Pawlenty paved the way for everything the Tea Party and the new conservative majority stands for.

And because of this – because Minnesota now has, for the first time in recent political memory, a genuine two-party system, with two sides that are actively holding each others’ feet in the political fire, and a genuine conservative opposition to Minnesota’s generations-long tradition of spend first, think later  – Tim Pawlenty has left this state a vastly better place than he took over.

Economies rise and fall.  Budgets work themselves out (and, with a new GOP majority that owes more than it admits to Pawlenty’s legacy now in charge, they’ll likely work themselves out a whole lot better than they would have).  But changing a state’s political system, vastly for the better?  That’s a wonderful thing.

I think Tim Pawlenty is getting grossly short shrift from conservatives in his all-but-certain bid for the presidency.  His record as a solid, commonsense fiscal conservative (on all the things that truly matter in the long view) deserves a serious look on the national stage.

Because while you can quibble about the details around and about the edges of his record, Tim Pawlenty’s real legacy is that of eight years of true political grit.  Pawlenty was doing the Tea Party’s work before there was a Tea Party.

And Minnesota needed that.  We needed it bad.

Pawlenty is leaving this state in good hands – at least, two chambers dominated by those good hands.  That new majority, in all their enthusiastic numbers, has two big shoes to fill.

Thanks, Governor Pawlenty.  I hope to write about you a lot more in the next two years.

Cross-posted from Shot In The Dark.

The University of Minnesota’s “Hubert H. Humphrey Institute” – a left-leaning think tank – has been running election polling for the past six years or so.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has been in the polling business rather longer – 66 years.

And in many ways, the polls are very different, But they seem to the casual observer to have one thing in common; in the run-up to major elections, especially close-fought ones (as most of them are in Minnesota these days), they both seem to favor Democratic (in Minnesota, they’re called “DFL”) candidates by an occasionally absurd margin.

The perception among many conservative bloggers – including Scott Johnson at Power Line, who’s been writing about the Minnesota Poll for the better part of a decade – is that something is fishy.

At long last, I decided to dig through the numbers and see what we could conclude.

It was an interesting exercise.

———-

A Little Background

The Star Tribune started running public opinion polling of the Minnesota electorate in 1944.  It’s polled Minnesotans over a variety of topics, but the marquee subjects are always the big three elections – State Governor, US Senate and Presidential elections.

Now, if you’ve lived in Minnesota in the past fifty years or so (I go back half of that time – I moved here in ’85), it’s hard to believe that Minnesota used to be a largely Republican state.  Of course, the Republicans we had up until very recently were the type that make the likes of Lori Sturdevant grunt with approval – “progressive” Republicans like Elmer Anderson and Wheelock Whitney and the like.

I bring this up to note that while the various parties have changed – Republicans used to be “progressive”, Democrats used to be “America First” – that Minnesota party politics for the past 66 years have been a little more evenly-matched than current political consciousness – shaped as its been by Humphrey and Mondale and “Minnesota Miracle” and Wellstone and Carlson – might make you believe.

Now, if you look at the Minnesota Poll’s statistics for the past 66 years – going back to the 1944 elections, for Governor, Senator and President – the Minnesota Poll is actually fairly even.  In that time, Republicans have gotten an average of 46.85 percent of the vote for all those offices, to 49.37% for DFLers.  During that time, the Minnesota Poll’s “election eve” predictions have averaged 44.1% for Republicans, and 46.77% for Democrats.  That means that over history, the big final Minnesota Poll has shown Republicans doing 2.75 points worse than they turned out, with DFLers coming in 2.59 points worse than they finally turned out.  The results have tended to be, over the course of 66 years, infinitesimally more accurate – .16% – for Democrats.  It’s insignificant, truly.

Indeed, when you go through the numbers from the forties and the fifties, you can see some blogger back in 1958 decrying two things – the lack of an internet to blog on, and a serious pro-Republican bias in the Minnesota poll; in polls run before 1960, the Minnesota poll predicted Republicans would get 51.58, while GOP candidates for the big three offices actually got 50.32% of the vote – the poll overestimated Republicans by an average of 1.26%.  The DFL got an average of 49.73% of the vote during those years, while the Minnesota Poll had them at an average of 43.51% -  which is 6.22% lower than they actually turned out doing (although this number gets inflated by a truly horrible performance in the 1948 Gubernatorial election, where the MNPoll had John Halstead at 25% in their pre-election poll; he ended up losing, but with 45%. That had to be frustrating).  In all, before 1960, the Strib “Minnesota Poll”‘s pre-election poll overestimated the GOP’s performance compared to the DFL’s in 76% of elections; the poll’s overestimates favored the GOP by an average of almost 7.5%.

By the mid-sixties, of course, Minnesota politics changed drastically; by the middle of the decade, the golden age of “progressive” politics and the DFL, led by the likes of Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale for the DFL, and Elmer Anderson for the GOP, left Minnesota a very different state.  During those years – from about 1966, after Barry Goldwater re-introduced a partisan divide to national politics for the first time, really, since the war – the DFL won the average vote 50.97 to 46.61.  The Minnesota Poll predicted DFL victories, on average, of 49.62 to 42.79; they underreported the final support for Republicans by an average of 3.83%, and DFLers by 1.35%, an average skew of almost 2.5% in favor of the DFL.

But if you look at the actual elections covered in those years – from 1966 to 1990, the “Golden Age of the DFL” – of the 21 contests for President, Governor and Senator, the Minnesota Poll showed the Democrat doing better than they turned out doing by a greater margin than the Republican in 13 of the elections, and inflating the GOP candidates results in eight.  The 1980 Presidential election skewed things a bit – the MNPoll underestimated Jimmy Carter’s performance by 12.5% (Carter got 46.5%, while the MNPoll predicted 34%; it also overestimated Reagan’s performance by a little over a point, leading to one of the biggest pro-Republican skews in the recent history of the Minnesota Poll).

Overall, for the entire history of the Minnesota Poll from 1944 to 1986, the Minnesota Poll showed the public voting, on election eve, for the DFL by a 48.25% to 46.34% average margin; the actual elections favored the DFL to 51.10 47.81; the poll underpolled Republicans by a 1.47% average, and Democrats by an average of 2.85%.  Of the 41 total contests in that time, the DFL was overestimated by a greater margin than the GOP in 44% of the polls – again, not a really significant number.

In other words, the poll’s statistical vicissitudes were fairly balanced through its first 42 years.

But in 1987, the Strib hired Rob Daves to run the Minnesota Poll.

And things would change.

———-

Daves, Goliath

Rob Daves took over the Minnesota Poll in 1987.

I have never met Rob Daves.  Either, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else.  I don’t know that his alt-media bete noir, Scott Johnson, has even met him, despite not a few requests for interviews.

I have no idea what Rob Daves thinks, believes, wants, says or does.  I know nothing about his personal life, and I really don’t want or need to.  For all I know, he’s a perfectly wonderful human being.

But for a 20 year period under his direction, the Minnesota Poll turned into an epic joke. How epic?

The numbers don’t lie.

———-

During the Rob Daves years, party politics in Minnesota skittered all over the map.  The governors office started DFL, changed hands, and with Dayton’s recount victory has changed back (by a half-point margin).    The Reagan/Bush 41 era seesawed to Clinton, then Dubya, and now Obama; both Senate seats started Republican; both switched to the DFL, eventually.

There has, in short, been a lot of variety, at least in terms of the Party ID winning the various elections.

But the Minnesota Poll has been oddly homogenous.

Throughout the Rob Daves era, the Democratic or DFL candidate in Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races has gotten an average of 45.68% of the vote, to 45.21% for the GOP.  That’s very, very close.

Some of the races have been blowouts – Amy Klobuchar’s 20 point drubbing of Mark Kennedy, Arne Carlson’s 30 point hammering of John Marty – and some, like our 2008 Senate and 2010 Governor races, have been (or still are) painfully close.

But you’d never know it from the Minnesota poll. The average vote totals – between the blowouts and upsets and squeakers – during Daves’ 1987-2007 tenure favored the DFL, barely, by 45.98 to 45.34%.  But the Minnesota Polls released just before all those elections showed the population favoring the DFL by 43.33 to 39.89%.

And of 18 total contests, the polling inaccuracies skewed in the direction of the DFL in 15.   The average skew toward the DFL came to almost three percentage points.

When you break things out, the differences get wider; in the five Presidential elections, the Minnesota Poll discerned a 49.67 to 36% DFL lead; the actual results were 50.13 to 41.64%.  The Minnesota Poll underrepresented the GOP by an average of 5.64% in Presidential elections during the Daves years.   The Strib Poll showed every single GOP candidate coming up short of his actual election performance:  George HW Bush polled 3.80% light; Dole, 7.00%;  Dubya, 8.50 and 6.61; McCain also polled seven points under his real performance.  The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to be polled fairly accurately; the average error poll  and election for Democratic presidential candidates was less than half a point.

The Senate races are a little closer – the Republicans underperform the election results 4.29% to 3.14%, a difference of 1.15% under their election results, which isn’t very significant – if you just look at raw numbers.  Well come back to that.

In the Gubernatorial races during the Daves years, though, the polling results were pretty lockstep. In gubernatorial races since 1987, the GOP has outpolled the DFL by an average of 46.77 to 38.91% – including one huge blowout (1994) and several squeakers.  But the Minnesota Poll has shown Minnesotans’ preferences at 40.17 to 36.67 in favor of the GOP.  Republicans’ performance was underpolled by 6.6% in the Minnesota poll – that of the DFL by only 2.24%.  The Minnesota poll showed Minnesotans underselecting Republicans by almost triple the margin of the actual elections.

A classic – and large – example was the 2002 Governor race.  The election-eve Minnesota Poll showed Pawlenty tipping Moe by 35-32.  The real margin was 44-36.  While the poll oversampled Independence Party candidate Tim Penny by a fairly impressive margin, the fact is that while the final MN Poll undershot Moe’s support by 4%, it underrepresented Pawlenty’s by nine solid points.

All in all, of the 20 Presidential, Senate and Gubernatorial races during the Daves era, 16 of them showed the Minnesota Poll underpolling the GOP by a greater degree than the DFL.

And that’s just counting all the races.

———-

Daves was let go at the Strib in 2007.  The Minnesota Poll was taken over by “Princeton Research Study Group”, which also does polling for Newsweek (whose polling is generally considered atrocious).

The 2008 races were very different, of course; the Senate race was a virtual tie, while Obama beat McCain handily.

But the day before the election, the Minnesota poll said McCain was polling just 37%; he ended up with 44%.  It overestimated Obama’s support by under a point, calling him at 55% when he got 54.2%.  The Minnesota Poll sandbagged Mac by seven points.

And Franken v. Coleman?   The day before the election, the poll showed Coleman almost four points below his actual performance (38% versus 41.98) ; it nailed Franken almost dead-on (42% i the poll, 41.99% by the time the recount was over).

PRSA showed both GOP candidates performing drastically off their real pace on election eve.

And a week before the gubernatorial election, the Minnesota Poll showed Emmer at 34%; he got 43.21%.  Nine points better than the Minnesota poll indicated.

The upshot?  Of the 20 total election contests in the Rob Daves and PRSA eras, the Minnesota Poll has underpolled GOP support in 17 – 85% – of those races.

And PRSA polling has, on average, underpolled the GOP by 6.12% in those three elections.   In other words, PRSA’s errors have favored the DFL to the tune of six points – which is more than the three-plus points of the Rob Daves era.

One might think that random statistics would scatter on both sides of the middle more or less equally.  And in the first 42 years of the Minnesota poll, in aggregate, they did, as we showed above.

But during the Daves years, and continuing with PRSA, the errors developed a consistency – shorting Republicans – and grew in magnitude.

———-

Of course, those averages hide some big swings; some races in those averages were real blowouts.

It’s been my theory that the Minnesota Poll’s “peculiarities” are most pronounced during close elections.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

The Humphrey Institute Poll

The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute is a combination public-policy study program and think tank at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  Named for the patriarch of the Democratic Farmer-Labor party – a forties-era amalgamation of traditional Democrats and neo-wobbly Farmer-Labor Union members whose Stalinist elements Humphrey famously purged in the mid-forties – the institution serves as a clearinghouse of soft-left chanting points and a retirement program for mostly left-of-center politicians and heelers.

The Institute has been doing general public opinion polling for years; in 2004, in conjunction with Minnesota Public Radio, they dove into the horserace game.

Let’s just sum up their performance in each of the five Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races they’ve polled in that time:

2004 Presidential Race

• HHH Poll:  Kerry 43, Bush 37
• Actual Election Results: Kerry 51, Bush 47
• Bush underrepresented by 10.61, Kerry by 8.09.

2006 Gubernatorial Race]

• HHH Poll: Hatch 45, Pawlenty 40
• Actual Election Results: Pawlenty 46.45.
• Pawlenty underrepresented by six, Hatch polled accurately.

2006 Senate Race

• HHH Poll: Klobuchar 54, Kennedy 34
• Actual Election Results: Klobuchar 58.06, Kennedy 37.94
• Kennedy underpolled by 3.94, Klobuchar by 4.06 – but it was a blowout.  We’ll come back to this.

2008 Presidential Election

• HHH Poll: Obama 56, Mccain 37
  
• Actual Election Results: Obama 54.2, McCain 44.
• Obama overrepresented almost two points; McCain, almost seven points under. A ten point race was portrayed as a 20 point landslide.

2008 US Senate Race

• HHH Poll: Franken 41, Coleman 37
• Actual Election Results: Franken by 41.99 to 41.98.
• Franken underrepresented by less than a point; Coleman, by almost five.  A tie race was portayed as a convincing five points beat-down.

2010 Governor Race

• HHH Poll: Dayton 41, Emmer 29.
• Actual Election: Dayton 43.63, Emmer 43.21, recount in progress.
• A tie race was depicted as a 12 point blowout.

A polling guru will say that these gross inaccuracies are a function of the Humphrey’s likely voter model – which for whatever reason assumed in each case that Democrats were much more likely to vote than Republicans, and likely to make up a greater portion of the electorate.

And yet the Humphrey Institute’s heuristics – the procedural, institutional and methodological rules by which institutions develop intelligence about things like voter behavior – seem to be stuck, for whatever reason, in the eighties.  The average HHH poll shows Republican candidates to be polling over five and a half points lower than Democrats in their real-life election performances.

Coincidence?

In five of the six races covered above, the errors in measurement underrepresented the GOP.  It’s an figure lower than that of the “Minnesota Poll” only because they’ve been in business sixty years fewer than the Strib’s poll.

Why would this be?

We”ll come back to that.

The Close Shaves

It’s almost become a cliche, among conservative observers of Minnesota elections.  You’re supporting a Republican.  You know the race is close.  You can feel the race is close.

And the final Humprhey and Minnesota polls come out, and the DFLer leads by an utterly absurd margin – like this year’s Humphrey Institute Poll, which showed a 12 point race…

…which, two days later, came in a statistical dead heat, with much less than half a point separating the two candidates.

And yet the Minnesota and Humphrey Institute polls have their defenders.

———-

Remember the 2006 Senate race?  Mark Kennedy vs. Amy Klobuchar?

The Minnesota poll did pretty well, all in all.  The final Minnesota poll showed Mark Kennedy getting 34 points, to Amy Klobuchar’s 55.  The race ended up being 58.06 to just shy of 38.    The Minnesota poll showed both candidates doing a little worse than they eventually wound up doing – Klobuchar a little worse, in fact.

Defenders of the Minnesota Poll – media people and lefty pundits – chimed in.  ”See?  The Minnesota poll is OK” or at the very least “The Minnesota Poll is an equal-opportunity incompetent”.

But if you’re a cynic – and when it comes to the Minnesota and Humphrey Polls, I most certainly am – the answer there is obvious; if you accept that the polls exist to help one party or another out of close jams (and let’s just say I think there’s a case to be made), then the real question is “how do the polls stack up when it really counts – during the close elections“?

I took a look at the Minnesota poll’s history with close races – Gubernatorial, Presidential and Senate races that ended up less than five points apart – over the past 66 years.   Since 1944 in these races – twenty of them – the DFL ended up getting 47.69% to the GOP’s 47.57% in the final elections.  The Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL getting 44.3% to 43.28% in the final pre-election poll.  Both numbers are very close, of course.  The Minnesota Poll has underrepresented Republicans by an average of 4.3 points, the DFL by 3.39.  So while the poll underrepresented Republicans in 14 of 20 races, it was by less than a point, on average.

But that’s over 66 years.  And if you recall from episode 1 of this series, the Minnesota Poll used to systematically undercount the DFL. But long story short – looking at the poll’s entire history, things are fairly close.

When you look at the Rob Daves era at the Minnesota poll, though, things change.

In close races (<5 point final difference) during the Rob Daves era, the GOP has actually gotten a slightly higher average vote total – 46.77% to 46.48% – in actual elections.  But the final Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL outpolling the GOP 43.33% to 40.78%.    Republicans come up an average of six points light in the final Minnesota Poll before the election, with DFLer finishing a little over three points short – nearly a 2-1 margin in underrepresentation.

In other words, in close races the Minnesota Poll has shown the GOP doing six points worse than they actually did, compared to three points for the DFL.  And the average Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL leading the GOP, when in fact the races have been mixed, with move Republican winners than in the previous 20-odd years of Minnesota history.

If you are an idealist, you could think that  it’s just a statistical anomaly.  To which the cynic notes that of eight close races, the GOP has been undercounted by less than the DFL exactly once.

The cynic might continue that it’s entirely possible that the Minnesota Poll doesn’t systematically short Republicans in close elections.  But given that the poll shorts Republicans in races that end up less than five points apart by an average of considerablymore than five points, the cynic would ask “if the Minnesota Poll were designed to keep Republicans home from the polls out of pure discouragement, how would it be any different than what we have now?”

Well, it could look like the Humphrey Poll.

Because the Humprey Poll is worse.  Granted, it’s a smaller sample size – there’ve been four “close” races (2004 Presidential, and the 2006 Governor,  2008 Senate and 2010 Governor races, which were/are very close indeed).

But in those race, the DFL won by an average of 45.43% to 44.7% (most of the gap coming from the four-point 2004 Presidental race; the other three had/have tallies within a point in difference).   But the final HHH poll showed the DFL/Democratic candidate winning by an average of seven points – 42.5 to 35.75%.  The DFL, is underrepresented in the HHH’s final pre-election poll by just a shade under three points; GOP is underpolls its real-life results by an average of almost nine points.

It’s possible that this is an honest error.  It is possible that the Humphrey Institute really, really believes that they have a likely voter model that accurately reflects Minnesota.  Perhaps it even does; maybe Minnesota really is a land of people who answer “DFL” on polls but come racing over to the GOP on election day.  But again – if the Humphrey Institute intended to help the DFL and keep Republicans home, it’s hard to see what they’d do differently.

Especially given the media’s reaction to these polls.

The Why They War

The Humphrey and Strib polls have been one of the ongoing “go to” subjects on my blog for almost eight years now.

Why?

Because while  the polls themselves are risible, they have an effect on elections in Minnesota.

Part of it is in terms of people – “undecided”, “independent” voters – going to the polls at all.  I’ve related on this blog several stories of people who’ve pondered not going to the polls this past year.  Part of it was  because of the overwhelming negativity about Tom Emmer portrayed by the media – negativity, partly driven by the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s long, Dayton-family-funded, largely dubiously-factual smear campaign, but pushed hard in the media via the “polling” that they, themselves, commissioned.

Larry Jacobs at the Hubert H. Humphrey (HHH) Institute is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media.  And during the campaign, Jacobs was seen as relentlessly as always in the Twin Cities media, flogging the Humphrey Institute’s polling first during the primaries (where the HHH’s polls showed Dayton with a crushing lead even though Dayton won the primaries by a margin not a whole lot bigger than the one we currently have in the governor’s race) and, finally, during the run-up to the election when the HHH poll showed Dayton winning with a 12 point blowout.

We’re still working on the recount for the 0.4% race.

Jacobs defended the poll (quoted in LFR):

JACOBS: Well, you know, a poll is nothing more than a snapshot in time. We’ve begun the interviewing nearly 2 weeks before election day. Barack Obama visited and we talked openly about the fact that this would likely change. There are, of course, all kinds of other factors that happened at the end, including the fact the almost 1 out of 5 undecided voters in our poll started to make up their mind.

The other thing to remember is that there were alot of other polls being conducted that showed the race closing at the time, something we were watching at the time, also.

That’s right, Dr. Jacobs.  There were a lot of other polls.

And except for the HHH and Minnesota polls, all of them showed a “snapshot in time” that was something close to the reality that eventually emerged on election day.

All of them.

So what?

Because opinion polling has an inordinate effect on media coverage and, less directly, the money and effort that people put into campaigns.

As to the media?  The New York Times has absorbed Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight” stats-blog for its election polling coverage.  And throughout the race, the Times ran with the idea that Dayton was overwhelmingly likely to win.

And that supposition was based entirely on a statistical tabulation of opinion poll results.  And the stats were heavily based on the Minnesota and Humphrey polls, especially through the middle of the race, when the tone of the campaign was being set.  All together, the crunching of the opinion poll numbers led Silver to claim the stats showed Minnesota would be a convincing 6.6 point victory for Dayton; since political statistics are an essentially weaselly “science”, Silver also ran with an eight point margin of error.

Naturally, the media ran with the 6.6 points; a little less with the margin of error.

Now, there’s some media attention – the Minnpost, the City Pages – to the ludicrous nature of the polls.  Jacobs:

“If a shortcoming is identified, we will fix it. If not, we will have third-party verification that our methods are sound.”

Dr. Jacobs:  take it from this third party; it’s flawed.  Flawed to the point of illegitimacy.

Hopefully the Minnesota voter will get the message, even if the Minnesota media doesn’t.

And when we do write about Minnesota – especially its freaks of electoral fate, like Al Franken and Jesse Ventura – we get a long string of similar comments; “What do you expect from Minnesota?”,  “That’s those crazy Minnesotans” and, when the Emmer/Dayton gubernatorial race comes up, “I don’t have a whole lot of hope for Minnesota”.  We were the only state that never voted for Reagan – although to be fair, the state voted for Walter Mondale, a native son, in 1984 (a year before I moved here).

If that’s what you feel, you’re wrong, and you need to re-think things.  And I’m going to try to start that rethinking right now.

Don’t get me wrong.  Minnesota is a strange place, in a lot of ways.  It’s an adopted home for all three of us; Ed’s from LA, King was born in New Hampshire and arrived in Minnesota via California among a few other places, and I grew up in North Dakota (and moved here 25 years ago as of this coming Wednesday).  And I think we’ve all scratched our heads, agog, at some of the political weirdness this state has spawned.

Everyone recalls the bizarre 2008 election, where former comedian and failed talk show host Al Franken beat incumbent Norm Coleman in a race that Coleman led by 200 votes on election night – and Franken won by 300 after eight months of recounts and legal maneuvering, exposing many flaws in Minnesota’s electoral system (like the law allowing people to vote without showing ID, but being vouched for by another registered voter).

More infamously, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, running for Minnesota’s “Independence” party, which was essentially a vanity offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Party, won the 1998 gubernatorial election, beating Hubert Humphrey’s son Skip and…Norm Coleman.

Minnesota has had plenty of electoral weirdness in the past; the Democratic/Farmer/Labor Party (the “DFL”, as we call Democrats here) had long ties to the far, far left; Stalinists were a powerful force in the party until Hubert H. Humphrey managed to purge them in the mid-forties; former Eighth District congressman John Bernard, of the antecedent, radical-left “Farmer/Labor” Party, cast the sole vote in 1938 against embargoing arms to the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War. Gus Hall, long-time head of the Communist Party USA and one-time perennial presidential candidate, was a Minnesota native, who cut his teeth as a radical organizing the mines of Northern Minnesota.

There are reasons Minnesota is an odd place:

Culture: Minnesota’s dominant culture in its formative years was immigrants from rural Scandinavia, especially Norway and Sweden.  Both nations have long histories of being poor, and developed communitarian traditions to cope with the grinding poverty of life in the Norwegian mountains, the endless woods of Sweden, and the motti of Finland. These communitarian traditions were easy to co-opt for political ends.

Institutions: Minnesota’s prosperity over the past 100 years has been built around several key institutions:

• Agriculture – Farmers in Minnesota and elsewhere tend to be conservatives, although like farmers in neighboring Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, they’ve had a willingness to vote for Democrats who bring home the pork.
• Mining – Iron mining was huge business on the “Iron Range”, the taconite-rich area of northern Minnesota, throughout the 20th century.  Miners – largely immigrants from Finland, Germany and eastern Europe – were easy pickings for labor organizers, and formed the hotbed for the radical, Communist-affiliated “Farmer Labor” party that eventually joined with the Democrats.
• The University System – Minnesota has two parallel university systems.  These systems run parallel lobbying efforts in the Legislature.  Lest you wondered, Minnesota faculties are no less far-left than academics in any other states.
• The Media – Minnesota’s newspaper of record, the Star/Tribune, is second to none nationwide in the flagrancy of its editorial board’s pro-DFL bias.  It’s other mainstream media – the Big Three network affiliates, and the programming (albeit not necessarily the News) divisions of Minnesota Public Radio, the nation’s largest public-media network and a pseudo-national network in its own right, aren’t far behind.
• Business – Minnesota’s key businesses – those that survive today (Target, 3M, Honeywell, Best Buy) and those that have gone by the wayside (Control Data, Cray, Daytons, Northwest Airlines) had a long tradition of communitarian philanthropy.  The DFL and their allied network of non-profits was happy to harness this to their ends.

Legend: Minnesota was a sleeping economic giant for decades before the late sixties – when the confluence of resources, an educated populace, infrastructure (the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and the rail system) and booming markets launched Minnesota into prosperity.  The media, Minnesota’s academy and the big-government interests assigned the success to a series of government programs that essentially redistributed tax wealth from the Twin Cities to the poorer outstate regions, christened it the “Minnesota Miracle”, and launched a myth that survives to this day.

Events: Minnesota was 20-odd years late to the Reagan Revolution.  The Minnesota GOP closely mirrored the national Republican Party throughout the fifties and sixties, the years of the Rockefeler/Eisenhower axis of very, very moderate, big-government Republicanism.  The aftermath of Watergate and the rise of the social conservatives in the national party in the mid-seventies caused then-ascendant “progressive” wing of the MNGOP to essentially secede from the national party, rebranding itself the “Independent Republican Party“, which lasted for twenty years and the governorships of very liberal Republicans Wendell Anderson and Arne Carlson (and Al Quie’s single term, during which his mid-stagflation budget-cutting enraged the DFL establishment enough to get him tossed from office).  The Republican grassroots didn’t actually get on board with the rebirth of conservatism until the mid-nineties.

So Minnesota’s got some dodgy history when it comes to politics.

But there are also grounds for hope – maybe immense hope.  Like most “purple” states, Minnesota is really very sharply divided between conservative and “progressive” voting.

The inner cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul – the 5th and 4th Districts, respectively – and the “Arrowhead”, the northeast part of the state, DFL-dominated Duluth and the Iron Range – are traditional DFL strongholds.

And it’s there that we see the encouragement.  Here’s why:

Demographics: The deepest-red districts – the southern and western suburbs of the Twin Cities – are where most of the growth is happening.  Most business and population growth is in these districts, which include the Second CD (John Kline, a staunch conservative who will win his race by at least 30 points this November), the Third (Erik Paulsen, who is growing more conservative in office as his district, once considered “purple”, drifts rightward) and the Sixth (Michele Bachmann, of whom more in a bit).

The Wave: It’s hard to tell, but it seems big things are happening in the hinterland.  First, the First District – the traditionally-Republican, ag-dominated southern tier of counties, represented by second-term DFLer Tim Walz – is considered in play; Walz supported Obamacare, which will gut one of the region’s major employers, the world-famous Mayo Clinic, which is already diversifying its operations outside the state and US to hedge against the worst.

Better yet?  The Seventh District – the tier of counties along the western border, represented for a generation by blue-dog Colin Peterson – are restless.  Lee Byberg, a Norwegian immigrant and bio-tech entrepreneur, has raised more money in this campaign than all of Peterson’s opponents together in recent memory.  The ag-dependent district is not thrilled about Obamacare, and there is speculation that those red counties could be one major tipping point away from sending a Republican to Washington.

Best of all?  That tipping point may be brewing up in mining country.  Last week, news broke that Chip Cravaack, an Annapolis grad and retired Navy chopper pilot, was within three points of 18-term Representative Jim Oberstar in an internal poll in the Eighth District, the “Arrowhead”, which has sent DFLers to Washington since 1947.  Oberstar hasn’t had less than a 29 point margin of victory in a generation. If it’s even close in the Eighth, anything can happen.  The voters in the Eighth are union voters, largely, and have been voting DFL for several generations – but they are largely pro-life, as was Oberstar, until he threw his lot in with the Administration on flipping the Stupak coalition toward Obamacare last year.  Worse?  Cap and Trade will shred the mining industry, which uses immense amounts of energy whose price spike after passage will put many mines out of business.

The Loyal Opposition: Conservatives in Minnesota are a close-knit political Band of Brothers; we’ve had to fight two wars in the past fifteen years.  We had to win over our party before we could even take on the DFL. And the veterans of those struggles are tough as nails, immune to abuse, and so clear on  principle that debates against DFL opponents usually resemble turkey shoots.  The rest of the nation knows Michele Bachmann as the vice-queen of the Tea Party, at Sarah Palin’s side.

But Bachmann didn’t start in Congress. She started out fighting the Stillwater (MN) school board, a Twin Cities exurb clogged with liberals tired of the DFL’s failed cities, but unable to leave the failed policies behind.  She had to battle her own district’s IR legacy to get endorsed, first for State Senate (where she was a conservative lightning rod for six years) and then against a moderate-leaning establishment in the Sixth District in 2006, even before facing the DFL.

Many Minnesota conservatives have similar stories; years spent fighting the “Independent Republican” establishment before even being able to take on the Democrats.

This has created a grass-roots conservatism in Minnesota that has slowly insinuated conservative ideals and, eventually, policies into parts of Minnesota that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago.

How do we know?  The latest Rasmussen poll shows that while voter ID in Minnesota is very close between the GOP and DFL, that Tea Party sympathy is actually higher in Minnesota than the national average.

Conservative Unity: Minnesota’s “craziness” was as much a symptom of the Minnesota GOP’s schizophrenia over the past forty years as it was to any liberal tradition.  For several elections, Minnesota’s “moderates” duked it out with, and defeated, conservatives; in 1990, while the GOP grass roots endorsed social conservative Alan Quist, Arne Carlson – a man more liberal on many issues than the DFL incumbent Rudy Perpich, including gun control and abortion – ran and won a primary challenge, and spent two terms as a free-spending, surplus-gobbling “Republican” governor.

Even Tim Pawlenty, who had a reputation as a pragmatist if not an outright moderate during his time as House Minority leader, had to tack hard to the right to fend off a challenge to get endorsed in 2002, against fiscalcon challenger Brian Sullivan, winning the nomination after promising “No New Taxes”.

This years MNGOP convention was distinguished by the fact that the front-runners – House minority leader Marty Seifert and eventual nominee Tom Emmer – while impeccably conservative, had three challengers to their right.  There was no “moderate” in the race (after Norm Coleman declared he wasn’t running).

For the first time in recorded history, the Minnesota GOP is a unified conservative bloc (to the consternation of the regional media, which audibly slavers for a return of the old, “moderate”/liberal “IR”, basically liberals with better suits.

So this is not your father’s Minnesota.  This is not the same Minnesota that voted for Walter Mondale.  This is a hungrier, less-prosperous Minnesota than the one that voted for Jesse Ventura in the cha-cha nineties, when the state was running multi-billion-dollar surpluses.  This is not the Obama-crazy state that delivered Al Franken to Washington – and the conservative movement is not the naive bunch of trusting schlemiels that let the DFL bully its way through a recount process that was designed to manufacture votes for Franken and toss votes for Coleman.  The wave of conservative, anti-Obama sentiment is washing up in Minnesota as well; there is evidence that the regional media has no idea how much so.

But as Ed and my radio colleague King Banaian – who is running for the Minnesota House of Representatives, in the exurban northwestern part of the metro – wrote this morning, there are no guarantees, and even in the best of times conservatives in Minnesota have to work harder than most:

For whatever reason (as discussed on the NARN shows on AM 1280 Saturday) and with Michael Barone at the Center of the American Experiment talk this past Tuesday, “Minnesota is different.” Whether it’s genetics, an isolated view of ‘liberalism’ or something else, in order for our great, conservative candidates to win, we simply have to work harder, dig deeper and make those voter ID phone calls. Yes, they can be a pain but we need to do them. Why? In 48 states, voters declare party affiliation at time of voter registration. They don’t have to spend $$$$ trying to find out who votes how. Any candidate can apply for the list of R or D or all voters and get it. We don’t have outside $$ funding id for us, we have to do it ourselves.

And so we do.

Don’t write Minnesota off.  This race is just getting interesting.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark

Mark Dayton, former Senator and scion of the Dayton’s department store fortune, is running for governor in Minnesota.  For months, he attacked his GOP-endorsed opponent, the Chris-Christie-like Tom Emmer, for “not having a plan”.

This past week, Emmer released the final details of his high-level plan to balance the state’s budget (currently slated to have a $6 Billion deficit).  It is, obviously, sparking much debate in Minnesota.

But Mark Dayton’s “plan”  - which is mostly built on the idea of “taxing the rich”; even the TV ads say so – oddly is getting less scrutiny.vvDayton Says: “Taxing the Rich” will raise four billion dollars.

This proposal adds a new top bracket at a rate of 10.95% starting in tax year 2011. The 10.95% bracket is set at $150,000 for married joint filers, $75,000 for married separate filers, and $130,000 for single and head of household filers. The new bracket is not adjusted yearly for inflation although the bottom brackets are adjusted for inflation in keeping with current law. The tax year impact is as follows:

And the end result, according to the MNDoR?

Tax Year Impact (in millions):

TY 2011 $752,800

TY 2012 $813,600

TY 2013 $879,100

So while Mark Dayton promised that “taxing the rich” would raise $4 Billion, almost closing the gap (but not quite; Dayton’s budget proposal (PDF document here) ends with the curious line “That leaves me $635.4 million to go”), in fact Dayton’s tax hikes will raise no more than $1.7 billion.

In other words, cranking the tax on “the rich” to a confiscatory 8 to 11% (actually 10.95, but let’s be honest here…) brings in less than half of what the Dayton budget “plan” says it will.

But even that is over triple the tax hike that the completely DFL-dominated Legislature could pass at the height of Obamamania; the Minnesota Senate passed a $400 million hike by one vote, long before anyone in Saint Paul associated “Tea Parties” with anything but Earl Gray.

Mark Dayton’s budget is DOA, even if he is lected, and even if the GOP doesn’t flip one of the two chambers back to GOP control.

The media isn’t reporting it that way yet, of course.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

The New York Times publishes a morale booster for the DFL (Minnesotan for “Democratic Party”), a week after the Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll showed the Minnesota bubernatorial race a dead heat.

The analysis – from “Five Thirty Eight”, a left-leaning statistics blog run amok (without mentioning anything about “Lies” and “Damned Lies”, for some reason) says Mark Dayton has a 78% chance of winning the gubernatorial election; they claim the current stats point toward a 46-41 Dayton win on November 2.

The DFL Chanting Point Bots are duly repeating that “78%” figure as if it is the be-all and end-all of the story.

They’re ignoring the part where the sausage gets made.

Look at the polls they select for their sampling.

The sample gives full weight (“.99″) to an August 2 Survey USA poll that came out about a week before the DFL primary.  When the DFL was outspending Emmer 16:1, and flogging their astroturf campaign against Target to maximum effect.

It gives 2/3 weight (“.66″) to last week’s MPR/Humphrey Institute poll, which showed the race a dead heat.

It gives .4 credit to the un-creditable Strib/”Minnesota” Poll, which showed a ten point Dayton lead, and a tiny little fringe of weight to Rasmussen and Survey USA polls from earlier this summer that showed Emmer inside the margin of error and long before Dayton started his orgy of spending on his slime campaign.

In other words, the stats that the DFL and media (in Minnesota, one must constantly pardon the redundancy) are jumping up and down and caterwauling about could hardly be better cherrypicked to show Dayton in a commanding lead; they are, to say the least, a misleading sample given a questionable weighting.

Take this number seriously at your own risk.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark

Sheila Corbett Kihne from the excellent Minnesota poltiical blog “Activist Next Door” did something nobody else in the Twin Cities media seems to feel the need to do; she started asking questions about Mark Dayton’s biography:

Mark Dayton’s current website biography reads:

After college, I taught 9th grade general science for two years in a New York City public school. It was the toughest job I’ve ever had!

Sheila thought she’d do a little simple fact-checking, and sent a “Freedom of Information Act” request to the New York Public Schools:

This was my request (in addition to standard template language for a FOI request)

Please email the following records:

confirmation of employment of:

Mark B. Dayton (birthdate 1/26/47) by the New York City Dept of Education/NYC Public Schools

dates of employment (believe them to be approximately July 1969-July 1971)

job title at the time of employment

school of employment

home address during the period of employment

The NYC Dept. of Education came back zilch; Sheila has scanned the NYCDOE’s response.  Follow the link and check it out.

Now, it’s quite possible that Mr. Dayton never took a salary while teaching, however there would still be some record of his employment. Why doesn’t the NYC public schools have any record of Mark Dayton working there when he says he did?

With an insanely left-leaning Minneapolis media establishment– with long-standing ties to the Dayton family– it’s unlikely that any will bother to ask Mark Dayton about it nor likely that this post will make any news.

I’m certain it’s just a bureaucratic snafu.  Perhaps an NYC Public Schools employee misspelled Dayton’s name; maybe the records aren’t on the computer, or are on files that got lost.  We do know that candidate Dayton has released a teaching license for the period he says he taught in the NYC Public Schools.

So it should be no great shakes to release something – a school, a principal, whatever – to validate that that rather key bit of his bio, the only non-government and/or non-plutocrat job he’s every held.

Perhaps the Dayton campaign could release some sort of documentary evidence to put this to rest?  So we can move on to the real campaign?

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

It was in the headlines throughout the leftymedia, yesterday, from the blogs to the HuffPo to, of course, newspapers:  ”Target feeling investor backlash”, said the headline in the Minneapolis Star/Tribune. The “backlash”, naturally, is from a donation Target made to a group called “MNForward”, a Minnesota PAC that supports a bipartisan assortment of pro-business Minnesota candidates.

The story – with emphasis added:

The backlash from gay-rights supporters against Target Corp.’s recent political donation now includes some institutional shareholders.

Three management firms that collectively hold $57.5 million of Target stock – Walden Asset Management, Calvert Asset Management and Trillium Asset Management – filed a proposal asking Target’s independent board members to undertake a “comprehensive review of Target’s political contributions and spending processes including the criteria used for such contributions,” according to a statement released Thursday night

Sounds pretty serious, huh?

There are two problems with this “story”:

Small Potatoes:  57.5 million dollars in Target stock equals about 0.0015 of Target Corp’s $38,190,000,000 (that’s thirty eight billion dollar and change) market capitalization; fifteen dollars out of every ten thousand worth of Target value.

That’s like taking fifteen cents out of a hundred dollars.

The amount of Target Corp stock owned by the three firms named in the story would have to move the decimal point a couple notches to even qualify as “piddling in the wind”.

This is not a serious challenge to Target.

But the Star Tribune didn’t figure the media consumer and Minnesota voter needed to know that.

Who Are Those “Investment Firms”? The Star Tribune, and the rest of the media covering this story, don’t feel it important to elaborate on who the three “institutional shareholders” involved in this “resolution” are.

All three are firms involved in “socially responsible investing” (SRI).

Walden is one of a group of investment companies demanding that President Obama create an office of Corporate Social Responsibility.

The purpose of the office would be to enhance and coordinate corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities across the government, at home and abroad, and to pursue policies and initiatives to strengthen the CSR commitments of the private sector.

A joint letter from the groups, released today, was organized by the 500-member Social Investment Forum (SIF), the U.S. membership association for socially and environmentally responsible investment professionals and institutions.

Calvert Asset Management also pursues left-friendly policies.

The organizations are asking the SEC to require companies to report annually on sustainability indicators in accordance with the most up-to-date reporting framework of the Global Reporting Initiative and on other material ESG matters as they come to light.

In a letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro that accompanied the proposal, the investors said: “The present global economic crisis has made it readily apparent that our existing system for corporate reporting has failed shareholders. We believe that robust sustainability reporting could have mitigated some of the impacts of the financial crisis. These types of disclosures would have promoted longer-term thinking by investors and corporations, and earlier detection of predatory lending and other destructive business practices. There is a tremendous opportunity to learn from these gaps and to construct a system of safeguards to protect investors. We are confident that mandatory sustainability reporting will contribute significantly to rebuilding public trust in corporations as well as the agencies regulating them in the wake of the present crisis.”

Trillium?  Yep – they’re an investment house that focuses on “Environtmental, Social and Governmental” “investment” – a “movement” focused on bypassing politics to affect policy by jiggering the capital market.

Their performance in the market is a matter of debate, perhaps.

But it’s not debateable that these three investment firms are not random firms purely focused on the non-political, fiduciary interests of the shareholder.  And it’s not up for debate that the three companies all together aren’t even a vaporous fraction of Target’s total worth.

So why does the Strib and the usual chorus of leftyblogs feel the need to omit all this from their coverage?

Misreporting and incomplete reporting is a pattern.  Two weeks ago, I busted the Saint Paul Pioneer Press claiming that Target’s share values were hurt by the controversy, on a week when the entire mid-to-high-level consumer retail market suffered a setback due to eroding consumer confidence numbers.

Now, this.

Now, we expect leftyblogs to leave out key bits of context.  But this brings up the troubling question – is the business media in the bag for Minnesota DFL candidate Mark Dayton?  What does this say about the rest of their “journalism?”

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

To fill time before their primary, a DFL-linked PAC has been running a series of largely-inaccurate attack ads against Emmer; as I noted on Hot Air two weeks ago, this group gets 2/3 of its funding from Mark Dayton and his relatives (and the rest from unions).

In the past week, a right-leaning PAC, “MN Forward”, started running a pro-Emmer ad.  The DFL learned that MN Forward was funded in part by a donation from Target Corporation, the Minneapolis-based mega-retailer that was, ironically, founded by Mark Dayton’s family.  Target, along with a list of other prominent Minnesota corporations (including Best Buy and Polaris) fears the business consequences of a DFL governor; Minnesota business already suffers from one of the highest corporate tax rates in the country.

And the DFL and its PAC minions haven’t taken well to the idea that our “corporate citizens” are exercising their new (via the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” case) right to spend money on campaigns.

I saw this bit on CBS News yesterday - entitled “Target Boycott Movement Grows Following Donation to Support “Antigay” Candidate” – and I thought “Wow.  Sounds like there’s a wave of spontaneous anti-Target fervor out there!”

Then I looked a little deeper.

The piece – featuring someone named “Roadie Roaring” or “Rudy Rattan” or something’; the woman’s diction is less-than-ideal – shows her walking into a Target, exchanging a bunch of goods, and demanding that her Target card be cut up.

It’s presented as if it were a spontaneous bit of reportage.  Look at it, you be the judge.

We’ll come back to Ronnie Roller in a bit.

With about three seconds to go in the piece, it notes that it was “Produced for the Uptake by Bill Sorem”.  ”The Uptake” is a left-leaning “Citizen Journalist” Group in the Twin Cities, about whom more in a bit.

I got an email from someone who follows these things:

Bill Sorem has records on Mn Campaign finance of giving a couple hundred bucks to the SD42 DFL (which includes Eden Prairie, the city where the faux boycott took place), and a $2300 contribution to The Obamanation.  So…a known DFL supporter just accidentally has his video camera and tapes this bit of faux news that is designed to threaten businesses into not contributing to causes that might benefit GOP candidates, helping his DFL party.
 
But of course, Bill has no unclean motives….NOOOOOOOOOO!

So – Bill Sorem just may not have  been a random passerby with a camera. 

The Uptake, the left-leaning “citizen journalism” videoblog, has spent the last year trying to convince the Legislature that they were a “news” organization worthy of credentials to cover the Legislature.  Now, they are participating in an attack ad run by “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, a PAC funded by Mark Dayton, his family, and his union supporters.

So who is “Randy Rattan?”

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring emails me:

Phil said that Rondy Raiton “sounds strangely similar to Randi Reitan, a gay activist mother who frequently is on the op ed page of the Strib.”
 
I googled Randi Reitan & clicked on her images page. BINGO!!! So much for this being a chance happening. Rest assured that I’ll be posting about this this afternoon.

So when you google Randi Reitan, you get – voila!  The picture of someone who is not only not just some random Target customer, but in fact is someone who is relishing her fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

A skim through the Federal Electi0ns Commission database shows that Mrs. Reitan has given over $10,000 to various Democratic candidates over the past decade or so (Patty Wetterling in ’04 and 05, First District congressman Tim Walz, Former state legislator Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, who ran against Michele Bachmann in 2008,  several to the DFL, a bundle to America Coming Together, a grand to Al Franken, a thou for Paul Wellstone, and much, much more.  Plus another $300 to Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s Secretary of State who presided over the Al Franken/Norm Coleman recount debacle, and $200 to the House DFL Caucus, according to the MN Campaign Finance board.

And her husband Phil?   Around $4,000 more.  Son, Jacob?  Another thou and change.

At the beginning, where Mrs. Reitan introduces herself, perhaps it would have been helpful and honest if she’d called herself “a mother, grandmother, and DFL uber-activist“.  Just saying.

So to summarize:  Alliance for a Better Minnesota (and CBS News) want us to swallow the following:

That Bill Sorem Just Happened To Videotape A Random Outraged Customer:  It’s hard to say if the producer wanted this event to look like a candid camera incident; it certainly looks staged.  But it was presented by the Uptake and A4aBM  as an organic, grassroots, random protest against Tom Emmer and against Target’s donation to the “MNForward” PAC, which supports Emmer in the gubernatorial election, and by CBS as .evidence of a mass movement against Target. 

This is bad journalism.

That The Uptake Is Anything But An Arm Of The DFL: After participating in an ABM attack campaign – which, as we noted two weeks ago, is funded by unions and, mostly, Mark Dayton and his relatiives - future protestations of being “journalists” should be taken with a large block of salt.

Long story short; the Uptake is staging the news for the ABM’s, and the DFL’s, benefit.

This is not journalism.

UPDATE:  Gary Gross at the excellent Minnesota conservative blog Let Freedom Ring does some more checking on Randi “Random Customer” Reitan.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

The DFL”s endorsement (the Minnesota term for “Democrats”) depends on an August 10 primary – but as this is written former Senator Mark Dayton has a commanding lead over the DFL-endorsed candidate (speaker of the MN House Margaret Anderson-Kelliher) and former state Rep. Matt Entenza.

Yes – that Mark Dayton – scion of the Dayton-Hudson fortune, and ranked in 2005 as one of America’s Five Worst Senators, after a series of bizarre antics that culminated in Dayton shutting down his DC office after a terror threat, leaving the other 99 Senators to carry on the nation’s business by themselves.

So while the DFL doesn’t have an official candidate yet, the DFL contenders have had their hands full fighting to win their own base.  They’ve had to leave it to the ringers to fight the campaign against Emmer.

So far in this campaign, as the DFL hammers its way toward its primary next month, most of the attacks against Tom Emmer have come from a shadowy group, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.  

I’ve busted them repeatedly stretching the truth and/or lying;  the Twin Cities’ ABC affiliate followed suit earlier this week. 

But who are these people?  And where did they get the money to run all these slick (if utterly truth-free) ads, and all these posh (but amateurishly-designed) websites?

Because they run through a lot of money!

2006 Campaign - We first heard of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (A4aBM) during the 2006 campaign.  During that outing, A4aBM spent $2,545,162 – about $2.3 million of it in ads against Governor Tim Pawlenty. 

Where did that money come from?  

Their donor list is as follows: 

• CWA COPE $5,000
• MAPE $5,000
• Midwest Values PAC (Al Franken’s PAC) $5,000
• MN AFL-CIO $5,000
• United Food Comml Workers $7,500
• Ma Mah Wi No Min Fund1 (Mille Lacs Tribe) $7,000

Unions and Native American gambling interests so far; no big surprises.

• Tom Kayser (MN) $7,500  [One of Minneapolis attorney and several-time DFL Senate contender Mike Ciresi's cronies]
• Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $15,000
• MN Nurses $15,000
• United Steelworkers $22,000
• Afscme Council 5 – $25,000
• Lks and Plains Carpenters $25,000
• IBEW MN State Council $25,000
• Intl Union of Operating Engineers $25,000
• America Votes MN $30,040 [aka "ACORN 2.0"]
• Coalition for Progress $50,000 (Mich)
• Laborers Dist Cncl $60,000
• Pat Stryker (CO) $100,000
• SEIU MN State Cncl $100,000
• Educ. MN $135,000
• Tim Gill (CO) $300,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $746,000
• Win Minnesota $778,500;

So – out of two and a half million dollars spent, about 20% – about $449,000 – came from those whom I thought were the most likely suspects, the unions.

And nearly 2/3 , over $1.5 million, came from two sources – “Alida Messinger”, and a group called “Win Minnesota”.

We’ll come back to both of them.

2010 Campaign So Far – To date in the gubernatorial campaign, A4aBM has raised $93,386 (as of this past Tuesday).  They’d spent $72,383 of it as of Tuesday (on ads that were, as we ascertained earlier this week,of dubious factuality).   Of that $93,386, 79.636 of it came from the “Win Minnesota PAC”.

So that’s two election cycles in a row (so far) where “Win Minnesota” has been the leading funder of scabrous hit pieces against Republican candidates.

Win Minnesota?  Seems pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?

Who is “Win Minnesota”, And Who Funds Them? – Here’s the list of major contributors to “Win Minnesota” during the 2006 campaign.  I’ll be adding the emphasis for reasons that’ll become fairly obvious:

• Anne Bartley (San Fran) $25,000 [Linked via the Rockefeller foundation to Alida Messinger - whose maiden name was "Rockefeller" and who...well, we'll get back to that.  She's also linked to Hillary Clinton's "Women's Leadership Council" and former Clinton administration figure]
• Shayna Berkowitz (Mpls) $100,000; ]
• John Cowles (Mpls) $20,000; [Why yes, the former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher!  But don't you dare say the Strib is biased!]
• Andrew Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• David Dayton (Mpls) $5,000;
• Eric Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
• Mark Dayton (Mpls) $25,000;
• Mary Lee Dayon (Mpls) $100,000;
• Vanessa Dayton $1,000;
• Sandra Ferry (NY) $50,000; [Yet another Rockefeller - sister of Alida Messinger]
• Barbara Forster (Mpls) $25,000; [generic liberal with deep pockets]
• Roger Hale (Mpls) $100,000; [Former Daytons' executive]
• John Harris (PA)$20,000;
• Myron Kunin $5,000; [Hair care tycoon]
• Kim Lund (Mpls) $25,000
• Darlene Luther 47A Committee $10,000 ;
• Alida Messinger (NY) $165,000;
• Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $20,000;
• Linda Pritzker (TX) $30,000; [Scionette of the Hyatt fortune, big-time liberal with deep pockets; major donor to MoveOn.org]
• Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $10,000;
• Tina Smith (Mpls) $10,000;
• Lynde Uihlein (WI)$100,000; [Schlitz heiress, long-time political plutocrat]
• Julie Zelle (MN) $5,000

That was a lot of Daytons, and people linked with the Daytons…wasn’t it?

So how about this year?

So far in 2010, “Win Minnesota” lists the following donors to “Win Minnesota”‘s current warchest (currently worth $1,173,500), again with emphasis added by me:

• Andrew Dayton $1,000
• David Dayton $50,000
• John cowles $25,000 [Remember him from 2006?]
• MaryLee Dayton $250,000
• Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
• Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
• James Deal (MN) $50,000
• Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
• Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
• Democratic Governors Association $250,000;

So of the $1.1 and change million warchest, $851,000 came from Daytons, and Alida Messinger.

But wait!  There is another fund registered with the state, with a different account number but with the same email and street addresses as “Minnesota Wins”, that has $850,000 socked away but has spent no money.

And where did that $850,000 come from?

• Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
• Win Minnesota $50,000
• Education MN $250,000
• Laborers District Council $100,000
• MAPE $50,000
• IBEW MN State Council $50,000
• MN Nurses Assc $50,000
• Local 49 Engineers $25,000
• Vance Opperman $50,000 [WestLaw poobah and longtime DFL mega-activist]
• Afscme Council 5 $50,000
• MN AFL-CIO $25,000
• SEIU MN State Council $50,000
• AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

And who is this Alita Messinger who has contributed so mightily – over $1.46 million over the past four years! – to the cause of disinforming Minnesotans about Republicans?  Other than the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III? 

The ex-wife of candidate Mark Dayton.

So “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” is essentially a front for a group of unions and, to the tune of millions over the past four years, Mark Dayton’s family, friends and ex-wife.

They are paying millions of dollars to advertise – and hiding it from casual view behind two layers of astroturf.

Mark Dayton is trying to buy the election, but he’s taking great pains to make sure you don’t know about it.

Crossposted at Shot In The Dark and True North.

“Mr. PresIdent, I want to see the boot on the neck of BP tonight… it’s OK tonight to act kind of like a dictator and call the shots saying this is the way it’s going to be.”

Granted, Schultz is one of very few talk show hosts who actually is as stupid as conservative talk radio is supposed to be.

But according to Thomas Sowell, who daily excretes more intelligence than Ed Schultz ever had, Schultz may be  getting his tingly-legged wish:

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In other words, the Republicans who “apologized” to BP – over the perversion of US law, as opposed to over accountability – were right?  Hmm.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of law.”

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

Because the problem is the next victim of government overreach won’t be a big bad capitalist like a BP.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.

Of course, like Ed Schultz, too many liberals don’t.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:

Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”

The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years.  China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.

Big hydroelectric dam?  Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”).  Beijing holds the Olympics?  Over a million relocated.

Sweet.

Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation. While the firm claims on its website it is a “non-government” organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their “fellow travelers” are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The “sweet deal” that Klein alluded to above is obviously too – in fact, sickly – sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.

The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is.  Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940′s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.

Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.

Leftyblogs:  Speaking “sweet deal” to power.

Seventy years ago today, the evacuation at Dunkirk was reaching its peak – after  a fitful start that had some wondering if Britain mightn’t be better off making a deal with Hitler.  And with it, the future of Western Civilization was…

…well, not “saved”; wars, as Churchill said, are not won by evacuations.  But the events seventy years ago this week sent World War II into a second act.

It had been three weeks since Germany had launched its invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands.   The feint into Holland with Germany’s second line troops accomplished its mission – drawing the best of the French Army, and the ten divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), into northern Belgium.

The Germans’ next step – pouring their best Panzer divisions thorugh the Ardennes Forest and driving straight for the English Channel – cut off the BEF and most of the best French troops – the regulars, the North Africans, the twentysomething soldiers – in Belgium.

The troops, cut off from supplies and communications, had to make their way to the Channel, under intense German pressure and constant bombardment from the German Luftwaffe.   By the end of May, the British, along thousands of French troops, were trapped in a pocket by the French port city of Dunkirk, right at the Belgian border.

It’s hard to describe how desperate, and fraught, this situation was.  The BEF was over 200,000 soldiers and airmen, including the bulk of Britain’s combat power at the time.   Losing them would cripple Britain’s war effort.  And it seemed very likely that they would lose the BEF.  King George VI ordered an unprecedented national week of prayer.

And it was then, starting on May 27, that Churchill – acting through Admiral Bertram Ramsay – ordered one of the most desperate gambles of all time.

He ordered Admiral Ramsay to attempt to evacuate the BEF, under fire, from Dunkirk.  To facilitate this, Ramsay put out another call – for Britains’ small boat owners, private and commercial, to volunteer their small craft and, if possible, themselves.

The outlook seemed grim.  Ramsey’s initial orders were to take two days to try to evacuate 45,000 men.  And on the first day, May 27, that looked improbable, with 7,000 men being picked up from the harbor the first day, and maybe 10,000 more the next.

But by May 30, Ramsey’s plan began to fall into place – aided by the Germans’ acceptance of Hermann Goering’s promise that the Luftwaffe could subdue the Brits alone, freeing up the German tanks to drive south.  He used larger ships – especially Britain’s fleet of destroyers, very fast ships that could carry hundreds of men back to safety at nearly 40 miles per hour, but needed the 15-20 feet of underwater room- to go into Dunkirk’s harbor and pick men up off the docks and especially “the Mole”, the harbor’s long breakwater.

In the meantime his call for “little ships” brought hundreds of smaller boats of all kinds, mostly shallow-draft boats capable of getting to or close to the beaches to pick up the thousands of men waiting there.

There were all manner of these boats – lifeboats from ocean liners, pleasure boats, trawlers and fishing smacks, dozens of Dutch canal boats that had fled the Netherlands (and carried thousands to safety), much of the UK’s rescue boat fleet, even a Thames river dredge.

Some of the soldiers on the beach in turn built makeshift docks out of the hundreds of army trucks that were going to be abandoned anyway, allowing men to clamber their way out into deeper water to be picked up more easily by the boats.

Between the two – small boats picking men off the beaches, larger ships carrying bulk lots from the harbor- it was seventy years ago today that the evacuation had its biggest day, with 22,000 picked up from the beaches and 45,000 more from the harbor.

The Germans tried to choke off the evacuation; air raids at one point forced the Royal Navy’s destroyers to restrict their entry into the harbor to night-time sorties.

Two days later – days after the supposed deadline, as Hitler finally overruled Goering and sent ground troops in to finish Dunkirk off – the last organized units of the BEF left the continent.  The Navy and the little ships were battered by losses – six of the vital destroyers and hundreds of the little ships had been sunk, with many more damaged.

The French government was putting immense political pressure on Churchill to evacuate French soldiers and send them, along with as many evacuated French troops as possible, back to France to help defend against the inevitable German offensive into France.  So Churchill and Ramsey ordered the evacuation to continue for another day, and then another, taking off mostly French troops as the French rear guard held off the Germans.  On June 4, it finally ended with 26,000 final rescues, the last boats leaving as the Germans entered the city, capturing the last of the French defenders.

In total, 338,000 men were rescued from the continent – 88% of the men who’d been trapped in the Dunkirk pocket nine days earlier.

That still left 30,000-odd who were captured – two divisions of the French rear guard, troops that fought until all hope was gone against insurmountable odds, and then only surrendered when ordered – and many British stragglers.

Still, compared to a week earlier, when it looked as if barely a third of the 45,000 man initial estimate might be saved, it was a miracle.

The French demanded that the rescued British and French troops be sent back to the south of France – but it was a ludicrous request. The troops had left all their artillery, trucks, tanks, and everything heavier than rifles lying in the sand.  They were exhausted – as was the Royal Navy.  As the last evacuation ships tied up in the UK, the next German offensive – “Plan Red” – that would lead to the capitulation of France, was about to start.  More on that on Saturday.

But the evacuation was vital to the war.  Britain’s 300,000 best troops went on to fight another day, and serve as the nucleus for the British war effort in North Africa, Italy and, finally, the return to France four years later.

Many of the French soldiers returned to France, mostly to become prisoners of war in a few short weeks.  But those that remained – the survivors of the best of the French military, the ones that had been sent into Belgium three weeks earlier – formed the nucleus of the Free French Army under Charles DeGaulle.  More on them later this week as well.

Re-equipping all those British troops accelerated Churchill’s negotiations with the US for “Lend-Lease” equipment – which, in turn, drew the US closer to war with Germany (although in 18 months Pearl Harbor would make that a moot point).

All in all, the evacuation allowed Churchill, on June 4, to make his “Dunkirk Speech” in the House of Commons a rousing, defiant one.  Not that Churchill was going to give a defeatist speech in any case – although the British war cabinet did in fact take a vote on seeking terms with Hitler; the evacuation helped make the vote a landside “no”.   More on that on Friday, as well.

And so while Memorial Day is an American holiday commemorating American troops, it’s worth paying some mind today for the many other people who’ve fought for freedom alongside American troops over the years; the Australians, Danes and Poles who joined us in Iraq; the Lithuanians and New Zealanders who are with us in Afghanistan; the Koreans who have not only defended their own homeland against their psychotic neighbor but joined us in Vietnam 45 years ago (suffering thousands of casualties but beating the Viet Cong on their own turf)…

…and, seventy years ago today, thousands of British soldiers and sailors and  weekend fishermen and boat hobbyists who kept Western Civilization alive until help could arrive.

(Worth a read)

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark

And in a room full of purists, it was easy to explain why believing in private property rights – a cornerstone of Libertarianism and, also, the United States – and the right to free association meant it was wrong to tell, say, a lunch counter owner that he had to desegregate his private property.  The proper response – in a room full of liberties purists who, as a general rule, are less racist than the population at large – is to not go to that lunch counter, and use your freedom of speech to let other people know that the owner ran a segregated lunch counter.

Of course, we rarely had to try to explain these things to people outside the room.  The Libertarians never won any elections – rarely got over a percent, in fact.

Ron Paul started changing that; he brought liberty-minded people into the GOP, and in some places took it over.

The Tea Party furthered this, sanding off (thankfully) some of Paul’s whackdoodle conspiracymongering and focusing on libertarian ideas of taxation, spending and the role of government – a discussion this nation desperately needs.

Rand Paul, running for the Senate in Kentucky, just got into trouble for getting into an argument about classical libertarianism in a forum that’s more concerned with squeedging attack sound bites out of people with elephants next to their names.

Howard Kurtz on the original interview that started the flap:

[Rand Paul] kept telling [MSNBC host Rachel] Maddow he was not in favor of discrimination. He would have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He supported the law’s ban on bias in public institutions. “Am I a bad person? Do I believe in awful things? No,” Paul said.

But he would not, despite repeated prodding, say the government should legally bar private institutions from discrimination.

And in doing so, he was that one thing politicians all claim to be, but almost none are;  honest.  He’s not a racist – indeed, to principled conservatives racism (imposing group stereotypes onto individuals) is an absolute wrong; to a Libertarian the thoughts in ones’ heart, the things one says, and the company one keeps are none of the government’s business – but everyone must be rigidly equal before the law:

“I’m all in favor of and that was desegregating the schools, desegregating public transportation, use public roads and public monopolies, desegregating public water fountains,” he said.

Which is a hunkydory discussion point among libertarians and Jeffersonian liberals; to them (us?), government has no place telling people they must not offend with their speech, their associations, or the use of their private property.  Among libertarians (big and small), at least as an academic discussion, allowing racists their constitutional rights to speak, associate and use their property as they wish does not in turn make one a racist – merely one who knows what government’s role is supposed to be, and the proper response to loathsome private beliefs, speech and behavior is evangelism and good speech.  It’s one of those poli-sci discussions that big-L Libertarians love to have, in the abstract.

But in politics, abstract questions have many layers of real manifestations:

“How about desegregating lunch counters?” Maddow said.

Mark Tapscott in the WashEx writes about the dim-witted feeding frenzy that ensued:

If the bloody waters that appear in the midst of such a shark frenzy make you uncomfortable, better get used to it. Odds are good that Paul is only the first of many Tea Party linked candidates whose inexperience in political combat with the media will spark such bloodbaths in coming months.

No such flap enveloped Scott Brown in Massachusetts probably because he had some prior experience as a Republican state senator in dealing with a hostile media in Massachusetts.

But many more of the Tea Party endorsed candidates who will gain visibility in the congressional campaign in coming months will, like Paul, be making their first-ever foray in seeking elective office. Like babes, they will go into brutal hand-to-hand combat with Establishment GOP, then Democratic opponents and their sympathetic journos, all of whom are seasoned veterans.

And when it comes to trying to frame your opponent, truth comes in a distant third to “making up a good chanting point to cleverly defame your opponent” and “making that chanting point so simple that any drooling SEIU droog can remember it”, in the hopes of taking a brief soundbyte of a statement intended as part of an academic discussion, and turning it first into “Rand Paul hates civil rights”, and thence to “Republicans are racists!”.

It’s poison for rational debate – but then, that’s not what the left, scared out of their minds by being on the wrong side of a populist tsunami, cares about.

The left is, of course, deeply hypocritical on the subject; via the ACLU, they are scrupulous about some peoples’  rights to speak and associate without question; somehow, the media managed to square the ACLU’s support for Nazis marching in Skokie with the idea that it didn’t mean the Democratic party sympathized with eliminationist anti-semites.   The rights of conservative college students, of course, don’t rate similar scrupulousness.

The lesson is a simple one, though.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know a couple of key truths for new politicians to remember when campaigning:

1. The media is in the bag for the Democrats.  Duh.
2. The media will cover for the “nuances” in the Dems’ positions; Rep. Keith Ellison, for example, will no more be grilled over whether his support for Hamas means he indirectly supports the extinction of Israel than Obama would be for his “bitter gun-clinging Jesus freaks” quote.
3. But they will find the energy to go over everything you say and do to find something that can be presented to the undecided to caricature you and frame you as part of the meme they are complicit in circulating about conservatives.
4. The left, believing as they do as a matter of historical, philosophical fact that “the ends justify the means, don’t care that they toss the entire context of what you say, and in effect lie about and defame you.  As long as it frames you so they win.

In ordinary times, by the way, this would be the point where I”d say “by the way, I oppose discrimination, and think Rand Paul was an idiot to try to get all academic on “nationa” TV on a subject as loaded as discrimination”.   But that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the smear machine at bay, these days.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

In other words, it’s as bad as 1980, when I was 17 and 18.

The problem is, by the time I was 21 jobs were everywhere, and the economy was on puree. I had more jobs that I knew what to do with by my junior year of college.

That’s just not going to happen with this recession.  White Castle’s CEO reports that just one provision in Obamacare is going to utterly gut low-income hiring:

Jamie Richardson, a White Castle executive, says, “We’ve been working on this internally from a number of different perspectives. One [provision] that has [us] the most concerned is the $3,000 penalty that kicks in when an employee’s portion of a premium exceeds 9.5% of Household Income.” Richardson elaborates, “In present form, this provision alone would lead to approximate increased costs equal to over 55% of what we earn annually in net income (based on [our] past 4-year average). Effectively cutting our net income in half would have [a] devastating impact on the business — cutting future expansion and more job creation at least in half. Sadly, it makes it difficult to justify growing where jobs are needed most — in lower income areas.” And that’s all from just a single provision in a 2,700-page act.

I love this next quote:

The Obama administration’s economic policy seems to involve dividing businesses into two categories: too big to fail, and too little to matter.

Alternately:  “too big to fail” and “future employees or wards of government”.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

The pants-wetting class is knotted up about a couple of marches planned for today; one, a group of armed Second Amendment activists, plans to hold a demonstration at a park in Virginia – the closest point to America’s political and traditional murder capitol, Washington DC, at which a law-abiding citizen can legally carry a gun.  And another group, the “Second Amendment March” or SAM, plans a march (unarmed, unfortunately) on the Capitol.

And that’s got the gun-grabbing left’s paranoia and mania for specious symbolism cranking overtime:

["Second Amendment March" founder Skip Coryell] claims he chose April 19 “because it is the 235th anniversary of Lexington-Concord.” However, the date also carries a rather unfortunate significance: the day militia sympathizers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Let’s stop right there.

“Militia sympathizers”?  That’s chipped from the same block as Andy Birkey’s swerve into collective guilt by association last week, when he (and, one presumes, the editors at the Soros-funded Center for “Independent” Media, which former Mindy staffers themselves noted actually call the shots and want the site to be a  flak organ for centrally-driven propaganda) used an irate, profanity-riddle phone message from someone who claimed to be a Tea Partier to try to impugn the entire Tea Party.   McVeigh and Nichols were criminals; if they “sympathized” with the Oakland Raiders, “Iron Chef” and “Twilight”, it wouldn’t mean that football fans, foodies and dozey teenagers had some dark inner secret.

“The Militia” in the US is everyone.  “A well-regulated militia being necessary for the preservation of liberty, the right of the people to keep and bear arms…” is what the Constitution says, in that little bit right after the part about freedom of speech that seems to be the only part most liberals ever read.   And the Supreme Court said “The People” means all of us in the Heller decision, two years ago.

The “militia” that the pants-wetting class is exercised about is not “the militia”.  It is a tiny collection of people with unfashionably acerbic views on society that the media and the pants-wetting class have set up as a boogeyman to scare society into place.

But let’s not stop with the significant anniversaries.  There are two more:

April 19 also marks the end of the weeks-long siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, TX. Dan Casey of the Roanake Times reported that “[s]ome activists in the gun-rights movement have tried to talk Coryell out of organizing” the march, fearing that the “political timing is bad” or that it “might lead people to believe the gun movement is a paper tiger with a few loud voices.”

It’s also the date of the Warsaw Uprising – which should be the story that people keep in mind when they think of “militias”.  The Jews of Poland had been herded into huge, miserable, starving ghettos while the Nazis built their extermination camps.  By April 19, 1942 many of them were already dead, of starvation or disease or murdered by their guards.

And a small band of Jewish patriots – “extremists”, as someone like Andy Birkey or ThinkProgress might call them today – decided it would be better to die with dignity and have a chance, however thin, at liberty than to quietly be sucked into Hitler’s death machine.  With a few stolen pistols and molotov cocktails, they rose, threw the Germans out of the Ghetto, and for a few weeks became a speed bump to Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”.

The media and left (ptr) focus on the April 19 of Oklahoma City (where a couple of cartoon characters that belonged in a movie about fringe lunatics managed to kill 168 Americans) and Waco (where a group with very unfashionable religious views ran afoul of their own leader’s delusions, a deeply-stupid government raid, and some very bad luck with chemicals) because it fits their narrative; the big mass of people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre need to be controlled, lest they hurt themselves.

But the April 19 of Lexington and Concord is a symbol of the power of We The People – which disturbs that other narrative.  And the April 19 of Warsaw shows why it should be the duty (in the patriotic sense, if not also statutory) for every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms – so that the next batch of Nazis can’t show anyone how very much more powerful than the pen the sword really is.

Of course Coryell’s fears are completely baseless. Obama has no intention of taking any anyone’s gun rights. In fact, during his campaign for president, Obama said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, and if you are a law-abiding gun owner, you have nothing to fear from an Obama administration.”

And why would Obama say that, after a career spent in gun-grabbing governments and working for gun-control-advocating non-profits?

Because of Americans who march to show Congress and the states that we are here, we’re better citizens than most, and we’re not going away.

Citizens like me.  Not Timothy McVeigh.

I wish I could be in DC.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

I say that because, naturally, if I don’t someone will accuse me of grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods, ready to shoot at revenooers.

At any rate, kudos to federal law enforcement and all, and goodnesss knows that’s going to come out at trial, but if the news reports are any indication, Big Sis has just “protected” us from the Keystone Militia:

In an indictment unsealed Monday, prosecutors said the group began military-style training in the Michigan woods in 2008, learning how to shoot guns and make and set off bombs.

Shooting guns?  You mean, like about 50% of the American people do?

I know; intent matters – the AP’s breathless, panicky delivery aside.

David Brian Stone, 44, of Clayton, Mich., and one of his sons were identified as the ringleaders of the group. Stone, who was known as “Captain Hutaree,” organized the group in paramilitary fashion and members were assigned secret names, prosecutors said. Ranks ranged from “radoks” to “gunners,” according to the group’s Web site.

I’m going to guess they had a secret handshake, to help them tell who was the mole, too.

Prosecutors said Stone had identified certain law enforcement officers near his home as potential targets. He and other members discussed setting off bombs at a police funeral, using a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his death, killing an officer after a traffic stop, or attacking the family of an officer, according to the indictment.

Now, when I first read that bit – that the “militia” planned to draw law enforcement into a huge ambush – I thought “this could have been a serious bunch of people”.  That’s a classic guerrilla tactic.

Why, in the hands of a ruthless, competent insurgency…

After such attacks, the group allegedly planned to retreat to “rally points” protected by trip-wired explosives for a violent standoff with the law.

…oh.  Never mind.

No confirmation on whether they planned to paint huge targets on their foreheads, or go into action with central lines already inserted for the lethal injections.

Hutaree says on its Web site its name means “Christian warrior” and describes the word as part of a secret language that few are privileged to know.

Secret languages.

Oddball internal rituals and ranks.

Inscrutably bobbleheaded strategy.

Janet Napolitano just rounded up the Scientologists.

Of course, this is no laughing matter; threatening to “levy war” is a big deal.

And it’s even less a laughing matter that our government feels the need to make a huge splash over Captain Hutaree and his Christian Avengers at a time when Congress’ Democratic Caucus is actively slandering dissenters with an overwrought, and curiously coordinated, campaign of finding “violence” and “threats” and “racism” under every rock (for which, somehow, no indictments exist; also evidence, other than the kind of thing every dogcatcher and sports reporter in America gets as part of the job).

Fearless prediction:  Look for a brow-furrowing “investigation” of “militias” by Ann Curry.

Stat.

UPDATE:  None of this should be read to imply I’m being the least bit flip about plots to murder policemen.  There was an 18 month investigation; plotting to kill police is serious business, no matter how – what’s the word – deranged?  The Hutarees will get their day in court, and it’d seem they deserve it.

Like the “Fort Dix Six” a few years ago, it’d seem the Hutarees were stacking up to be fairly incompetent terrorists – but incompetent terrorists can still kill peole.

And it would have been wrong to have used the “Fort Dix Six” as an excuse to repress American Muslims, or to smear their politics.

Cross-posted at  Shot In The Dark.

“It’s not socialism!”

And they’re more or less correct, at the moment, if and only if you observe exactly one, excessively restrictive dictionary definition of “socialism”.

But, in practical, real-world terms, there really are two definitions.

I will try to explain these definitions with real-world examples.  However, as the real-world examples use a few historical terms that tend, shall we say, to inflame conversation and serve as red blankets before bulls, I’ll change the names of those terms to keep things on an even keel and focus on the actual policy and mechanical differences between the two definitions.

Example 1:

Promising that they will make life easier and more tenable to the people, the Bommunist party abolishes private enterprise and makes all businesses state-owned.

These state-owned businesses, answerable only to centralized state planning agencies – operating in what economists call a “command economy” – are utterly divorced from the free market, and produce entirely based on political imperatives from above, rather than market demands from all around them.  Also, absent any of the discipline of the free market, productivity plummets.  Eventually, the system becomes unable to sustain any sort of economic activity.

Example 2:

Promising to make life easier and more tenable for the people, the National Bocialist Party (*) also realizes unfettered free enterprise is a threat to its control – but has learned something from ten years of watching the Bommunist Party flounder and fail.

So the National Bocialists decide to keep the “best” (for their purposes) of the free market – the expertise and disclipline of capitalist businesses and their owners – but put them under centralized control scarcely less complete than that of the Bommunists.  The ideal, of course, was to keep the outward appearances of capitalism and avoid the worst failures of full government ownership – but to make it essentially impossible for industry to do anything other than what government mandated.

(Data on the National Bocialist system fades out after about 12 years, but preliminary results weren’t all that encouraging for anything other than artificial bubbles in things government needed in huge numbers quickly, like – again, hypothetically – Banzers, Bukas and Boo Boats).

Again – the Bommunists and the National Bocialists are completely hypothetical, and any similarities to political parties that existed in the real world is purely concidental.

Except for their economics.

So is Obamacare socialist?

As it is being considered today?  How is Obamacare, with its thin, unconvincing veener of “marketiness”, different from the (utterly hypothetical) Example 2, above?

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

(*) Why, no – it’s not a completely original idea…

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Paul Ehrlich.  Leading the attack.

Ladies and gentlemen, this battle may be over. 

Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera – butterflies.  But in 1968 he wrote one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of pseudo-scientific literature, The Population Bomb.  In it, Ehrlich reprised the work of Thomas Malthus, arguing that population growth would eventually, inevitably lead mankind to three choices:  Stop making new humans, stop consuming resources, or starve to death.  The book started ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He spent much of the next decade writing other books and articles in support of his thesis in Population Bomb, adding in a later article “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The book and his body of “work” through the seventies proposed a number of radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis; dumping sterilizing agents into water supplies, allowing only selected people the privilege of reproduction, and performing mass “triage” of nations, the same way an emergency room triages patients – between those who don’t need help (North America, Australia, parts of Europe), those who can be saved, and those who are behond help – India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia, which he predicted would be hell on earth by the 1980′s; he essentially gave up all hope for Africa and India.  Our ecology was going to strike back at us; in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years – due not to starvation, but to pesticides.

By the mid-seventies, though Ehrlich broadened his sights a bit, behond overpopulation and into geopolitics.  In 1975′s The End of Affluence, Ehrlich predicted cataclysmic food riots in America, leading the President to declare martial law.  But it did no good – in Ehrlich’s narrative – because the world was driven to destroy the US in a combined nuclear assault, spurred by our use of…

…pesticides.

He broadened it further with 1978′s The Race Bomb, which was a paranoid melange on the dangers of racial diversity, followed by The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States, in which he called for sealing off the border long before it became Tom Tancredo’s issue. 

By the eighties, he’d joined with much of the left’s elite (who were, by the by, not busy participating in food riots or race wars, and were well-fed enough to go to protests) in warning about the danger of nuclear war, joining with Carl Sagan to write The Cold And The Dark, demanding the US disarm just in time for our generations of deterrence to render the point moot with the fall of the Soviet Union.

He was, of course, early on the Climate Change bandwagon, with Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, a 1998 book co-authored with his wife Anne, which basically served as a model for the left’s response to questions about Global Warming this past decade – he didnt’ call for Nuremberg trials per se, but he wasn’t that far off, either.

His body of work – at least, his work that impinges on politics and human events – has had three things in common. 

He’s blamed Western Civilization – especially our economic freedom – for successive waves of self-caused, predicted catastrophes.

He’s prescription to deal with these catastrophes has been, in every case, for the individual to surrender his/her autonomy, and even future, to an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful central entity that’ll make all the hard, life and death choices for them.

And he’s been wrong on every count.  Humans, rather than sitting in caves waiting to get eaten by sabre tooth tigers, invented spears.  Faced with floods, we invented the sandbag as an alternative to drowning and mildew.  And faced with shortage of resources, we adapt.  And humanity in the past forty years has adapted – learning to grow crops where we didn’t before, learning to conserve farmland and water, developing new crops and practices. 

Julian Simon, an American economist, placed a bet with Ehrlich:

Simon set up a bet wherein he would sell Ehrlich $1,000 dollars worth of any five commodities that Ehrlich chose. Ehrlich would hold the commodities for ten years. If the prices rose — meaning scarcity — Simon would buy the commodities back from Ehrlich at the higher price. If the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Professor Ehrlich jumped at the bet, noting that he wanted to “accept the offer before other greedy people jumped in.”

In October of 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $570.07. As Simon predicted, free markets provided lower prices and more options. Simon would have won even if prices weren’t adjusted for inflation. He then offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred.

The bet never happened.  Ehrlich moved on.

To global warming.

While Simon died, it’d seem that another bet was placed, if only in spirit.  Ehrlich is paying us all back with excess hot air.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

French Cops Say Top Cop A Flop (July 8, 1943)

(Vichy, France) (AP) - A leading association of French policemen condemned the film portrayal of a French police chief as “unrealistic” in a statement released today.

Jacques Omerde, spokeshomme for the Fraternal Order of Vichy French Law Enforcement Officers, said “the character of Jean Renault, played by Claude Rains in the recent hit movie Casablanca, is unrealistic and tres degradement.”

“Mr. Rains’ portrayal of a corrupt, semi-competent lothario besmirches the reputation and good name of the hard-working law-enforcement officers who work for the Vichy government.”

“Furthermore” Omerde concluded from the prepared statement, “the final scene – where Prefect Renault ignored the shooting of a German officer – would in real life be a gross violation of procedure.  There have been no real-life accusations of any such behavior”.

Omerde called on Casablanca’s director, Paul Henreid, to apologize.

Fisherman’s Association Says Hemingway Story, Movie Just Big Fish Tale: (July 8, 1952)(Miami, FLorida) (AP) - The Association of Cuban-American Fishermen are crying “foul” over Ernest Hemingway’s latest novel, Old Man and the Sea.

“Cuban fisherman have a tradition of fraternalism”, said Juan-Carlos De Miel, president of the ACAF’s Miami chapter.  “84 day losing streak or no, nobody would have ostracized the old man.  Because as our anscestors said in Cuba, “It takes  a village to take care of an old guy”.

“Also, no fisherman worth his salt would have lashed a marlin to the side of a skiff.  Procedures would have prevented the shark attack that consumed the Marlin; it’s utterly unrealistic!”

“Finally, this book and movie portrays Cuban fishermen as rash, impetuous people, when in fact we are a group of solid professional fish extraction technicians”.

Paper Execs: TV Series Papers Over The Truth (July 8, 2004)(New York, NY) (AP) - The American TV series “The Office” “defames the American paper sales industry’s proud traditi0n of professionalism”, according to American Association For Paper Sales president Excedrine Ruff.

“Funny may be funny, but I can say with complete assurance that a manager like Michael Scott would never be permitted in the American paper sales industry”. 

“It’s defamatory”.

Silly?  Of course.  Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office aren’t about Vichy police procedure, the commercial fishing industry or paper sales.  They’re allegories about America’s status as a reluctant warrior, the Bible, and the dynamics of groups of people jammed together in an artificial situation. 

To find anything trivializing or defamatory in any of them requires, at best, an overly-literal reading – and at worst, a focus on grievance-mongering that’s become so common that the little parodies above could very well exist for real, for all we know, somewhere in the world of academe this past few decades.

But Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office are not literal descriptions of professions or industries.  They all aim for something else.

So, too, with Hurt Locker.

———-

The Hurt Locker doesn’t seem to leave a lot of people in the middle; people either love it (it’s up there with Avatar as the front-runner for Best Picture at the Oscars) or not love it (some veterans pan its realism).

Let me take a step back here.

There are very, very few people in the world who take their calling quite as seriously as soldiers (and sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, for that matter); their trades are literally a matter of life and death for themselves, their comrades, everyone around them and, eventually, all of us.  Like cops, firemen, doctors, nurses and paramedics, theirs is a profession not merely of commitment – but where the consequences of lack of commitment are deadly.

Duly noted.  That is as it should be.

And people who take their professions seriously are justifiably critical of people who try to portray their profession inaccurately. 

Is Hurt Locker “accurate?” 

Not in the sense that, say, Band of Brothers strove for accuracy.  But BoB was history – a collective oral history of real events told by real people, who were portrayed as themselves, as they had been 50 years earlier.  It’s theme was very literal; a group of ordinary, teenage-to-twentysomethign Americans who did extraordinary things, and forged an extraordinary bond.  It was a story as powerful as any fiction.

Hurt Locker is a work of fiction.  It’s not literal history; its’ primary purpose isn’t accuracy, and isn’t supposed to be.

If it was, of course, it’ would have failed…:

The film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by journalist Mark Boal (who was embedded with a bomb disposal team), stars Jeremy Renner as Staff Sgt. William James. Not deterred by protocol or his own safety, James is an adrenaline-addicted bomb defuser who occasionally puts his unit at risk, and at one point takes to the streets of Baghdad on a solo personal mission. Members of EOD teams in southern Iraq said in interviews arranged by the Army that “The Hurt Locker” is a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.

Sgt. Eric Gordon of San Pedro, an Air Force EOD technician on his second tour in Iraq, has watched the movie a few times with his friends. “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh,” Gordon said.

He scoffed at a scene in which a bomb is defused with wire cutters. “It’s similar to having a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle,” Gordon said.

An EOD team leader in Maysan province, Staff Sgt. Jeremy D. Phillips, said, “My interest is bringing myself and my team members home alive, with all of our appendages in the right place.”

Although he was glad the film highlighted their trade, he disliked the celluloid treatment of EOD units. “There is too much John Wayne and cowboy stuff. It is very loosely based on actual events,” he said. “I’m honestly glad they are trying to convey to the public what we’ve been doing, and I wish maybe they had just done it with a little bit of a different spin on it,” he said.

Others are more supportive. Sloan, a former U.S. Army captain, said at the panel discussion that “The Hurt Locker” offered a perfect snapshot of modern conflict. “This is what’s going on for the men and women who are fighting this war,” he said.

All well and good, the pro and the con.  Those reviews are better than some I’ve seen, like this one on Yahoo…:

“The depiction of our community in this film is disrespectful,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “We are not cowboys. We are not reckless. We are professionals.”

This is more or less the same review I got from a fellow from Big Hollywood that John Hinderaker interviewed on the Volume I Northern Alliance show a few weeks back; the show was anti-American, or at least anti-military, because it portrayed soldiers unrealistically – and some of that portrayal was at the very least unprofessional, to say nothing of not technically realistic; they do things, they say, that American soldiers realistically just don’t do, as professionals, warriors or people.

Which would be a valid criticism – except that the movie isn’t about what American soldiers do.  It’s not a how-to on disposing of bombs, or fighting a counterinsurgency.  It’s about war, and its affect on people who partake in it.  It’s about psychology, not combat engineering.

The big three criticisms seem to be that the Hurt Locker:

• is technically unrealistic,
• shows the American troops – from Jeremy Renner’s taut, layered Staff Sergeant Mackey to David Morse’s almost surfer-dude-like bird colonel to Christian Camargo’s flippant, risk-taking psychiatrist - as unrealistically unprofessional.
• that it show’s Renner’s character as an unrealistically bad human being.

As to the first charge?  Doy.  That was apparent in Mackey’s first incident – where he pulled on a piece of wire and dislodged eight artillery shells connected into a remote-controlled explosive.  The shells wiggled like empty milk cartons when Mackey pulled the wire; in reality, they weigh 80-100 pounds apiece.  Chalk it up to dramatic license.

As to the second charge?  I’ll refer back to my original review last summer.  I noted that the movie gave us a hint in the opening scene:

The new film The Hurt Locker opens with this quote, from former NYTimes war correspondent Chris Hedges, in white type over a black background:

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

As the movie rolled into the first scene, the last clause – “war is a drug” stayed highlighted.

…

…I had no idea what to say about the film.  Something didn’t quite add up.

Then I looked up the rest of Chris Hedges’ quote.   I found it, from a piece he wrote for Amnesty International back in 2002:

…one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.

And then it hit me.  It’s not a war movie – or should I say, it’s not just a war movie.  It’s a movie about war as a drug, and its affect on its addicts.

The movie isn’t about bomb disposal engineers.  The film could have been set among Israeli tank drivers or Danish commandos or British submariners, or for that matter professional infantrymen from the Roman centurion to Lee Marvin’s long-timer “The Sergeant” in The Big Red One to the yin and yang of Sergeants Barnes and Elias (Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe) in Platoon to any number of other portrayals of people who’ve made a living of the art, craft and hell of war.  It’s not about defusing bombs; it’s about war’s affect on a guy who does it for a living and a life.

The final criticism – which was levelled by the Big Hollywood critic on the NARN broadcast – was that near the end of the film…

SPOILER ALERT

…Mackey, clearly chafing in civilian life with his wife and son, eventually takes his boy aside and, in one of the most gut-punching scenes in the movie, tells him he doesn’t love him, on his way back to the war.

Is this something a father would do?  Something we want to think of an American soldier doing?  Of course not.  And for all we know it’s never happened.

But is it something an addict does?  Every day.

The Hurt Locker is set among combat bomb disposal engineers.  But it’s not about them.  It’s not even necessarily about Iraq; the encroaching, paranoia-inducing civilians could have been Vietnamese or French or Japenese or Ukrainian or Gallic, for that matter.

It’s about men, and the relationship some of them have with war.

And it’s a great one.  Not “realistic”, perhaps – but then that’s not the point.

ACORN employees caught on video apparently advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings did not commit a crime, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said Monday.

The office began its investigation Sept. 15, the day after the video was released online by the conservative activists who posed as an outlaw couple seeking help buying a house. It was but one in a series of such videos filmed at ACORN offices around the country that sparked a national scandal and helped drive the organization to near ruin.

…is the admission that there is no law against telling people how to set up a brothel in Brooklyn. Which, to be fair, is probably also the (lack of) law in your county, too (Rent a building, get a no-interest loan from a city community development fund, get some hookers).

Will the left portray it as “ACORN did nothing wrong?”

“We are gratified that the district attorney, after a thorough investigation, found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by ACORN,” said a statement by Jean Sassine, a spokeswoman for the organization that has replaced ACORN’s Brooklyn operation.

Well, not there, anyway.

But give it time.

UPDATE:  But was the Brooklyn DA in the bag for ACORN?

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Reality shows quite the opposite, of course; from the SEIU thugs beating the guy at the Carnahan Town Hall into the hospital to the whinging infants who threw bricks and bleach during the Saint Paul Republican National Convention, the left has the genuinely checkered record.

Sad to say, today’s Franken rally in Minneapolis was no exception.

Early in the rally, a guy carrying a “Teamster for Conservatism” stood at the entrance to the parking lot at the rally site (the Labor Temple, in northeast Minneapolis).  I never did get his name.

He was standing on the curb next to the driveway.  One of the attendees in a Toyota apparently saw him, yelled something, and gunned his engine, forcing the protester to get out of the way.  The driver parked in the parking lot and went into the rally – but the protester and a couple of witnesses got the license number and called the police.  When the rally ended, the Minneapolis Police – who’d been waiting around the event – pulled him over.  Nobody was hurt, and there were no charges to place, but the cops did give the little fella a good talking to, and then made him shake hands with the protester.

As I noted in my previous post on the subject, there weren’t many pro-Obama counterprotesters.  They were pretty standard-issue stuff; not very articulate, not very well-informed, and pretty harmless.

This guy was both of the above – but he brought an element of stupid to the proceedings that livened things up for all of us.  We noticed him when he stood on one of the corners across from the Temple, bellowing “Teabaggers!  Teabaggersj!” over and over again.

That’s a spine.  With a couple of putative testicles, ready for “Teabagging”, which the protester (whose name we got, but which I’ll keep offline) had helpfully affixed. (Because we have all been assured that when lefties yell about “Teabaggers”, they’re referring to the people who sent bags of Lipton to Congress.  Of course).

As I noted in my previous post (“It’s Fun Being Outside The Alamo For A Change“), not only is it fun outnumbering the other guys out on the streets for the first time I can remember – but I hate to think what it’s like for the lefties being stuck inside the Alamo with some of these whackdoodles.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

We’ll come back to that. 

I’ve told this story many, many times.  I think it’s still illustrative.  Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.

• At precinct caucuses, you could be assured that there would be an avalanche of pro-life/anti-stem cell/anti-gay-marriage resolutions.  In the former two cases, they would be largely redundant with what was already in the platform.  No matter; they had to be debated and voted up or down, one at a time. 
• At legislative district (“BPOU”, in the MNGOP’s curious parlance) conventions, there’d be two big clusters of people in the room.  To stage right, there’d be a group of pro-lifers.  To stage left, there’d be everyone else.  And if one was running for a district office, one could expect a series of questions about one’s commitment to life.  “Are you pro-life?”  “How pro-life are you?”  “Please describe exactly how pro-life you are?”  “If your pro-life-ness were a mountain, which mountain would it be – Denali, K-2 or the Matterhorn?” 

And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.  During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.  And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.  They came for their issues, and their issues alone.

That was then.

Now, we have the Tea Parties.  And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.  You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.

And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.  Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.  Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.  Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.  Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.  And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”. 

All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.

Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.

And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.

Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea Party movement yesterday.   I read it.

At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.   It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.

I said almost.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

I chewed on that last clause for a bit.  A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.  To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top. 

But to an NPR-listening, Times-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading gun freaks” do.

In other words, it’s something foreign.  Un-American.  Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

“Militia groups”.  It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre. 

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

“Shadowy international networks”.

You see some of that at the Tea Parties.  Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of  the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.  People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well. 

Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway. 

And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

“Ah”, I thought.  “This could be good!”.   The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)  to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism by the hard times.

Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Of all the “local peculiarities” to pick, what do you suppose the odds were? 

The piece focuses, throughout, on the Tea Parties’ most paranoid lunatic fringe – almost as if to say “pay no attention to the populist awakening behind the curtain, Boston and New York and San Francisco!  They are unclean!  These are the bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freaks we warned you about!”

If they can’t beat the Tea Party on the facts, it’s logical that the next step will be fearmongering.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

The Tea Parties are an odd phenomenon in American politics; they’re a mass movement that more or less defies conventional party labels. 

When I spoke at the September 17 “Constitution Day” rally at the Minnesota State Capitol  last fall, I asked people to raise their hands if the word I mentioned described them.  I asked for Republicans to raise their hands (a little over half); Libertarians (10-ish percent); DFLers (a smattering, maybe 20 people, whom I urged to not feel bashful); Ron Paul supporters (a good 20%); people who’d rather pound a nail into their forehead than vote for Ron Paul (a giggly 20% or so); people who were sick of all the parties (maybe 30%).

The point – then, as now – was that the Tea Party movement, amorphous and leaderless as it was and remains, wasn’t a phenomenon tied to particular political party.  It was more in line with the GOP’s traditional limited-government emphasis, but for many Tea Partiers the burden is on the GOP to prove that it’s repented of its free-spending ways from 2000 through 2008.

Long story short; the GOP has to earn the votes of an awful lot of Tea Partiers.

Kenneth Vogel in Politico notes the challenge Republicans face with tea partiers:

Across the country, conservative tea party activists — many new to politics and unaffiliated with, if not averse to, the Republican Party — are increasingly finding themselves the target of intense GOP courting headed into the critical 2010 midterm elections.

Republican National Committee Michael Steele’s plans on meeting Tuesday with about 50 tea party leaders. The California GOP chairman recently trained tea partiers on political organizing and is planning a party-sponsored rally. The South Carolina GOP has a resource-sharing agreement with tea party groups. The North Dakota party chairman hosted a tea party-GOP rally Friday and is urging fellow state chairs to do the same.

But for tea partiers, who from the early days of their movement wanted to be heard and taken seriously, it’s a little bit of careful what you wish for.

Some have welcomed the attention, forging tentative alliances or at least opening channels of communication, usually to intense criticism from fellow tea partiers. But most have either proudly spurned Republican advances or approached their suitors apprehensively, keenly aware that while Republican resources and infrastructure could both boost the tea party movement to a new level of effectiveness, the GOP’s tainted brand could also jeopardize the independence that is part of their populist appeal.

In a sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the GOP has needed for most of the past decade; a return to solid fiscal conservatism as a means of turning the nation around, while leaving social issues as a big black box to be decided by the individual. 

Of course, everyone knows social issues are the bedrock issue for another huge block of conservatives, the Evangelicans without whom, says conventional wisdom, the GOP faces a very uphill climb.

The ideal, for the GOP, is to follow the Reagan model; to make peace with those you agree with on the big issues – at this point, taxes and spending – and live and let live on the other issues.  The GOP, at a high level, seems to be learning this.

And this terrifies the left; the only thing that is holding the right back is its predilection for shooting itself in the foot over the real-but-overblown divide between fiscal and social conservatives.

The left knows this.  That’s why, in the immediate aftermath of the Massachusetts special election, you saw a wave of leftymedia/leftblog postings, starting with Media Matter and radiating out to their subjects, saying “ReThugLiCons just elected a pro-choicer!  They are teh Heppocreet!”

They know that if the various factions on the right can agree, at worst, to disagree on social issues, that we will be well-nigh unstoppable in 2010 and, if Obama/Reid/Pelosi stay their current course, possible 2012 as well. 

Which is why you can expect a constant drumbeat of media coverage of libertarian Tea Partiers who don’t care one iota, at least in terms of electoral politics, about abortion or gay marriage.  It’s a considered effort to drive a wedge between evangelicals and Tea Partiers.

There are two approaches the GOP needs to take to this. 

• The Tea Party is a sign that the conservative movement has grown up and agreed to disagree.  The New Jersey Gubernatorial and Massachussets Senator elections showed that conservatism has learned how to prioritize, knowing that…
• …a fiscal conservative tax-and-spending hawk who has a “nuanced” position on abortion is going to be a friendly representative for single-issue pro-life evangelicals than a Democrat who is wrong on taxes and is in the bag for NOW and Planned Parenthood.  Indeed, it just might be a sign of what is, for the left, the unthinkable; that Evangelicals are growing beyond single-issue voting.  And that’d be very bad news for the Dems.

And so look for the Dems to beat on this supposed, potential wedge for all they’re worth in the next eight months.  The best hope they have of turning back the Tea Party surge is by turning it against itself; by pitting fiscally-conservative Republicans against unaligned fiscal-conservatives over what is, for purposes of attacking the current orgy of spending, a side-issue.

Cross-posted on Shot In The Dark.

But starting in high school, I had doubts; the Dems were a disaster on national security; the economy was falling apart; I started to have doubts that “giving everything to everyone” was anything more than a good campaign promise to people who didn’t think all that hard in the first place.

Those doubts culminated in looking furtively about the polling station in November of 1984 and pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan.  And then lying to my parents about it.  For the time being, anyway; I obviously stayed conservative; within two years, I was hosting a conservative talk show in the Twin Cities.

So here’s a question: was my political evolution, which was a  considered result of a whole lot of reading and thinking and discussion, a sign of growing up and finding myself when it came to my political worldview?

Or a sign that I was just incoherent?

The latter, claims Jacob Weisberg in a Newsweek article called “Why the Public Is to Blame for the Political Mess”

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

That’s a fairly big thought, there.  We’ll come back to that.

Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the economic stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but polls reflect something more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.

They neglect one other things; polls don’t exist in a vacuum.

A year ago, “the public” was wracked with Bush fatigue.  With the full connivance of a media that was completely in the bag for Barack Obama (painting him as a centrist, for crying out loud), they had a brief fling with radical liberalism.  Then they saw the price tag, and the rot that would set in if Obama’s agenda passed, and changed their minds.

They may be demanding action – but not the action that Reid, Pelosi and Obama want to bring them.

Weisberg is half right. The public had a moment of immature incoherence.  It lasted through all of 2008.

We’ll see if people grow up by 2012.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.