Monthly Archives: April 2016

The ACLU Vs. The First Amendment, Freedom, and “Choice”

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So if you take the idea of “choice” on moral issues  – like, say, abortion – seriously, then people are supposed to be able to make “choices” about participating in the practice.

Because the First Amendment protects freedom of conscience!

And the ACLU protects the First Amendment.  Right?

Well…

A federal judge just tossed the ACLU’s suit against a chain of Catholic hospitals, because he found that the plaintiff’s claim that women were “harmed” by having to look for, y’know, a non-Catholic hospital to get an abortion was specious:

On Monday, weeks before oral arguments were scheduled to take place, Judge Gershwin E. Drain of the U.S. district court for Eastern Michigan dismissed the suit, calling the ACLU’s claims “dubious.” It’s tempting to follow suit and dismiss from our minds the agenda underlying the ACLU’s legal action. But we can’t afford to do that.

Emphasis added:

Think about it: The ACLU argued that a hospital should require its doctors and nurses to perform abortions even if the hospital recognizes that a new human life begins at conception and holds that the moral weight of abortion is no less than that of taking the life of a born person. The playing field is shifting under our feet. This lawsuit wasn’t about “choice” at all; it was about ensuring that medical professionals can’t act on their beliefs if they clash with assumptions that are politically in vogue. Rather than invoke the old mantra that abortion is between a woman and her doctor, the ACLU did the opposite, arguing that the government should be involved in decisions for abortion by stipulating that others participate in them.

The goal, of course, is to make abortion safe, legal, and enforceable under thoughtcrime statutes.

Thanks!

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It was another successful pledge week!

As I’ve said many, many times; I’d do this blog for free, and for an audience of five a day – which is how it started. The fact that I have a decent-sized audience just makes it more fun. The fact that so many of you chip in a buck or two to support me in this effort, on top of all that, is both humbling and exhilarating.

Thanks, all!




More information about SITD and the Pledge Drive.

Home To Roost

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Ten years ago, the transit-happy left pointed to the DC Metro as an example of how urban mass transit could be done.

In particular, they said?  It was less of a money pit than anticipated.

Unmentioned (except from the right):  they shaved money by deferring maintenance.  Equipment and facilities that were supposed to have a thirty-year service life has been soldiering on, deferring maintance, for forty years.

And it’s starting to cause problems; a series of public meltdowns including a train that spent an hour stuck under the Potomac river yesterday:

A female passenger on the disabled train told us she will no longer use Metro after this incident.

“Say no to Metro,” she said. “I haven’t done it in a while and to be on a brand new car – no … I got better ways to go. I’ve got two feet. I trust those better than I do Metro.”

Mass transit.  It’s great, provided you actually believe those who claim to know better than you actually know better than you do.

Our Blizzard Of Snowflakes

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Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

The current Campus Crybaby Crisis is explained by Reynold’s Law:
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
If fewer people were able to afford college, degrees would become valuable again. Plus, young people wouldn’t be saddled with a mountain of unpayable and non-dischargeable debt, so they could afford to buy houses and start families.
Student loans: end them, don’t mend them.
Joe Doakes

Along with making education about, well, education, rather than schooling (to say nothing of indoctrination).

State Of The Union Depot

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Two years ago, Saint Paul re-opened the Union Depot after a $240 million taxpayer-financed facelift.

Now comes news that Christos – a long-time anchor restaurant in the Depot’s lobby, since back the day when the Depot itself was the anchor, ifYouGetMyDrift,  is likely bailing.

OK, restaurants come and go – although it’s weird to think a place like Christos, that survived a couple of decades in the neighborhood before taxpayer-finance subsistence in the form of CHS Stadium and government-subsidized artist lofts finally came to Lowertown, is just now pulling up stakes and heading back to Minneapolis (although that is perhaps part of a larger series to be done, about why restaurants just can’t make it in Saint Paul, and so retreat to Minneapolis or the ‘burbs to make ends meet).

But behind that story?  The big news:  even with all the taxpayer-subsidized largesse descending on Lowertown, the Union Depot is losing $6 million dollars a year:

“It doesn’t go a week that somebody doesn’t stop me in the street and say, ‘You threw away my money,’ ” said Ramsey County Commissioner Rafael Ortega, who fought from the beginning for the Depot project. “How do you put a price on quality of life, mobility of community, which has a huge impact on economic situation?”

I do.  It’s in the property taxes I pay to finance Rafael Ortega’s version of “quality of life”.  It’s a very definite amount, and it takes away from my quality of life.

I digress:

If you can’t put a price, you can put a cost. Ramsey County says the Depot is bringing in $1.7 million in revenue, but costing $7.7 million to operate. That’s up from 2014, when revenues were $1.5 million and operating expenses $6 million — a $4.5 million gap.

Ortega, who is chair of the Ramsey County Regional Railroad Authority, and other county officials say the site was never meant to be a direct revenue generator. They note repeatedly that ridership, foot traffic and the Depot’s long-term social and economic benefits may not be realized until years — perhaps decades. And since its December 2012 opening, they have focused on attracting major carriers, and gotten them: Amtrak, Greyhound and Megabus.

They got them by squeezing out of perfectly adequate quarters elsewhere; Amtrak’s presumably long-paid-for station on Cleveland is now sitting fallow; the former Greyhound “station” on University, likewise.  Megabus?  In Minneapolis, Megabus picks up at a city bus stop by Target Center.  No need to spend hundreds of millions.

And don’t give me that “the long-term benefits won’t be realized for decades” claptrap, Mr. Ortega; that sounds a lot like “there’s trouble in River City and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool”.

Look, I get it.  It’s a beautiful depot.  But we warned you this would happen.

Open Letter To Samantha Bee

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To:  Samantha Bee, Overpromoted Woman With LibFluff Show
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Inequity

Ms. Bee,

It is easier to buy either a gun or get an abortion or register to vote or buy methamphetamine than it is to put a show on cable entitled, say, “Full Frontal With Mitch Bee”.  Because you own that trademark.  It’s  your, um, “intellectual” property.

Kind of like the NRA Eagle.

The liberal “alt”-media; actually as dumb as the left thinks talk radio is.

That is all.

(Well, not quite all.  Remember when everyone was saying John Oliver was the greatest thing since Michael Moore?    Brilliant, incisive, yadda yadda?  I watched his famous “expose” on Donald Trump.  And the big, marquee point that was the conclusion to the whooooooole buildup?   The most damning thing they had on Trump, one of the most damnable people in modern American life?  His family’s original name was “Drumpf”.  That’s it.  I want that 25 minutes of my life back).

Amy Klobuchar: On The Bandwagon

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I got an email from Senator Klobuchar the other day.

Dear Rudolph,

chanting_points_200px

So apparently Senator Klobuchar is buying mailing lists from “MoveOn.org” – “Rudolph” is my sock puppet ID there.

Anyway:

My parents raised me to know that with hard work and determination, I could become anything I wanted to be. It’s a lesson I’ve worked to pass on to every young woman I meet.

Senator Klobuchar:  hard work helps.

Having a father who was one of the most famous men in Minnesota probably helped a lot too.

Just saying:  can the Horatio Alger.  You ain’t it.

But I digress:

But here’s the catch: They might not be paid equally for it.

Today is Equal Pay Day, the symbolic day when American women finally earn as much as men doing the same job earned the year before. It’s hard to believe that in 2016, women on average still only earn 79 cents for every dollar men make.

It’s hard to believe, because it’s not true.

If you read this blog, you’re probably already too smart to fall for that particular line; it’s just wrong.

  • If you compare two 35 year old lawyers, and one of them has worked as a lawyer for ten uninterrupted years, and one has combined five years of law with five years of child-rearing, who do you think should get paid more – to be a lawyer?   As in, for their expertise and experience representing clients?
  • If you compare 1000 average male college grads and 1000 average female college grads, the odds are pretty decent that more men have majored in things like engineering, computer science, hard science, pre-med, management – things that pay pretty well – and more women will have majored in social work, education, arts, humanities, and other disciplines that just plain pay less.  And – this is important – they did it voluntarily. 

If you compare men and women in the same job with the same experience and credentials, and all other things – merit, skill, connections – are equal, differences in pay fall inside the margin of error.   In fact, given that young men are being pushed out of getting higher educations, younger women are actually out-earning young men, according to some studies.

Klobuchar knows this, of course.  But the American left is currently in a bout of working its way toward a grievancegasm.

And by golly, Amy’s not one to be left behind.

I have been proud to cosponsor the Paycheck Fairness Act every Congress that I’ve been a senator, and I will keep fighting until we get this done.

Of course she will.  She owes a chit to the Trial Lawyers Association (as do all Democrats), who will be the only ones to benefit from the “Paycheck Fairness Act”, which is nothing but a full-employment bill for lawyers.

Senator Klobuchar’s audience is no less the gullible and uninformed than that of of any other Democrat.

What Once Was Trayf Is Now Orthodox!

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2014:  Barring service in support of activities with which one morally disagrees – for instance, declining to provide flowers or baking for a same-sex wedding – is wrong wrong wrong.

2015:  Barring service as a result of activities with which one morally disagrees – like North Carolina – is a moral imperative.

Sign the petition supporting Bruce Springsteen’s campaign to support free association!

The American Left:  Moral Schizophrenics!

Unhinged

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

North Carolina passed a law saying boys can’t shower with girls in public high schools, and dirty old men can’t lurk in the girls’ restrooms at the park.
Here is the text of the law.
Liberals are losing their minds over it. Can someone explain why?
Joe Doakes

For the same reason they lost their minds over Target in 2010; because they were told to.  Because the left need a cause to rally their troops around one of two geriatric honkies in November.

If I Did Conspiracy Theories…

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…which I don’t, this one would jump out at me.

For most of human history, abortion has been considered one variety of undesirable or another.  Then, two things happened:  First, Margaret Sanger ushered in the idea of using abortion as a Eugenic tool, to control the population of what Sanger and other eugenicists considered undesirable – especially black people.  Second, abortion became a political litmus test on the left.    Result:  African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for a party whose primary civil sacrament is a procedure that has killed tens of millions of them (not to mention a “war on poverty” that has kept them disproportionally poor).

In other words, the left are dedicated to killing black people, and they’ve talked black people into voting for them.

So follow me, here.

For most of human history, the social labor contract has been this: you work hard to learn a skill of sufficient value that someone is willing to pay you to do it (or, similarly, develop the skills to start a business that someone is willing to pay you to patronize), and you earn.  Then, two things happened:  the left developed another civil sacrament, the “Living Wage” – the idea that merely existing entitled one to a wage sufficient (so we’re told) for maintaining a lifestyle.  Second, technology developed the means to cost-effectively supplant workers whose pay was statutorily higher than their value.   It’s nothing new, of course; industrial automation replaced a generation of guys who’d gotten high school diplomas and wandered into union jobs turning wrenches for middle-class incomes.  It happened on the assembly line, it’s going to happen at Burger King.

In other words, the left is dedicated to policies that will make the poor even poorer.  Yet again.

Whew.  It’s a good thing the education system is in such a mess, or people would start to see whats…

…oh.  Right.

Never mind.

(And yet Democrats jabber about places like Kansas and Wisconsin “voting against their interests”.  That’s always worth a laugh).

I Hate Photomemes

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The “photomeme” – the bits of graphic overlaid with a simple, usually simplistic, message – may be, along with Twitter,  the greatest step toward Orwell’s “duckspeak” that Western communications have ever taken.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not occasionally brilliant:

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But it’s rare. Oh, so rare.

Failure Is A Green Orphan

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Ten years or so ago, when Germany embarked on a trillion-dollar campaign to phase out fossil and nuclear power and replace it with wind, the Greens, the Climate-Change Mafia and the media – along with a whooole lot of Green Energy scammers – applauded like Comintern members at a Stalin speech.

Today?  Crickets.

The government plans to cap the total amount of wind energy at 40 to 45 percent of national capacity, according to the report. By 2019, this policy would cause a massive reduction of 6,000 megawatts of wind power capacity compared to the end of 2015’s capacity.
“The domestic market for many [wind turbine] manufacturers collapses completely,” Julia Verlinden, a spokesperson for the German Green Party, told Berliner Zeitung. “With their plan, the federal government is killing the wind companies.” Verlinden goes on to blame the political influence of “old, fossil fuel power plants.”

They can “blame” the fact that “Green energy” is not economically sustainable.

At all.

Open Letter To Bruce Springsteen

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To:  Bruce Springsteen
From:  Mitch Berg, Longtime Fan
Re:  Beliefs

Bruuuuuce,

As everyone knows, I’m a longtime fan – at least in part because you are, or at least were during your heyday, the writer of some of the most evocative music there is for conservatives.

Now comes news that you’ve cancelled your concerts in North Carolina, because of (the liberal media’s distorted version of) a rest-room bill.

Some, especially on my side of the political fence, will no doubt criticize you for this stance.

I, however, come to praise you for it.  Because, given that there are no doubt contractual obligations involved with your North Carolina appearances between your promoters, your production company, the venue and the countless vendors involved, not to mention tens of thousands of tickets for the event, you would seem to be risking a lot…

…to stand up for a businessperson’s right to not serve people they morally disagree with.

Kudos!

That is all.

What Are Words For, When No-One Listens Anymore

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Every gun control argument you ever heard, explained in one sentence (emphasis added):
“We don’t elect futurists. We elect mostly lawyers, which means people who think the world is not only made of words . . . but that if you change the words the world will change.”
I read Sarah Hoyt, not because she’s such a great writer or even a great thinker, but because she occasionally hits the ball over the stands, out of the park and into the river. This is one of those moments.
Joe Doakes

This is up there with Lileks’ observation – that politics is full of smart people who believe that process actually accomplishes things.

Fear The Walking Dead: Exit 288

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SCENE: The prairie.  It’s the dead of winter.  The sky sweeps above in 180 degrees of piercing blue, studded with a few isolated scudding clouds, pale with the reflections of frozen ice crystals in the air, as the very humidity itself is frozen.  The wind is light – 10 mph – as it sweeps across the plains.   As far as the eye can see, there is snow.  

A squad car rolls up a four lane freeway.  Behind the wheel, Officer Tom CHRISTIANSON, a Barnes County sheriff’s deputy, sails briskly up the road, his whoopie lights turned off.  CHRISTIANSON, a trim, purposeful man in his late thirties, looks tired, even a little haggard, but his eyes are focused and fierce.    The camera briefly focuses on a green freeway sign:  “Fargo 72; Valley City 12”.  And then another:  “Exit 288 – No Services”.

CHRISTIANSON slows and pulls up behind a Ford F150 Club Cab, which is idling on the shoulder of the eastbound lane just east of the exit  He climbs out of his squad car, dons his stetson, and walks up to the pickup, his breath steaming in the bitter cold as it blows away.  

Jake and Donna STADEL, a thirty-something couple, are standing by the tailgate.  Jake is carrying a hunting rifle; Donna, a long-barreled hunting shotgun.   CHRISTIANSON shakes Jake and then Donna’s hands.  

CHRISTIANSON:  Jake.  Donna.

J STADEL:   Deputy.

D STADEL:   Tom.

J STADEL:   So is it true what they’ve been saying?

CHRISTIANSON:  (Shakes head in a way that says “just a little numb from fatigue and confusion”).  No idea.  Last thing anyone knows is that all the TV and cable networks went off the air.

J STADEL:   Did you see that one live newscast where they…

D STADEL:  …overran the news crew live on the air, on camera…

J STADEL:  In the middle of that riot?

(All three go silent, shaking their heads, wincing in horror at the horrid memory).

CHRISTIANSON:   Yep.  I did.

J STADEL:   So they’re saying they (thumb points over shoulder, off-camera to the right) are pretty much everywhere these days?

CHRISTIANSON:   The whole east coast.  All of California.  The whole deep south.  Even the desert southwest.  The last ham-radio transmissions say they’re pretty much the only thing left walking in those parts of the country.   There’s a few survivors, I suppose, but they’re few and far between.

J STADEL:  Jeez.

D STADEL:  God.

CHRISTIANSON:  Yep.

J STADEL:  So we’re…

CHRISTIANSON:  Us and South Dakota, northern Minnesota, Montana, the U.P,. Alaska, Manitoba and Saskatchewan and parts of Alberta, Russia, Finland…

(All three shake their heads as the thought trails off).

CHRISTIANSON:  Well, thanks for calling this in.  Let’s get to it.

(Camera pulls back and pans right, and we see a large herd of zombies trailing off to the east, perhaps two hundred of them – all of them frozen stiff; a few jerk fitfully about and hack and gack feebly; most are utterly frozen.  The three grab machetes and axes, and walk toward group and start hacking).

CHRISTIANSON:  You still doing poker on Friday, Jake?  (Grunts has he hacks off a frozen head)

J STADEL:  Oh, ya.  You betcha. Won’t be there until after Shania’s basketball game.  (Plunges knife into zombie skull)

CHRISTIANSON:  How’s the team doing this year?

D STADEL:  She’s finally getting enough playing time.  Now we just gotta get her chemistry grade up…  (Smashes a head with an axe)

CHRISTIANSON:  I had to take away Ashley’s X-box…

(Fade to black over mundane small talk as the three matter-of-factly go about lopping off frozen zombies).  

(And SCENE)

For Purposes Of Argument

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals moan about money in elections. Imagine the Liberals are correct and it’s possible to buy politicians. How much would you pay to buy a Supreme Court justice seat to replace Scalia, knowing that failure gives the other side decades to control the law?

Joe doakes

I for one will throw a bake sale.