Twin Cities TV news from January 2nd, 1980:

Maybe the phantom of the past is not ready to let us go:

Carter feared that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in which an estimated 30,000 combat troops entered that nation and established a puppet government, would threaten the stability of strategic neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan and could lead to the USSR gaining control over much of the world's oil supplies.

Thirty years later, the news is the same, even including the threat of nuclear attack:

Carter asked the Senate to shelve ratification talks on SALT II, the nuclear arms treaty that he and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev had already signed, and the president called U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas J. Watson back to Washington for "consultation," in an effort to let the Kremlin know that military intervention in Afghanistan was unacceptable.

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Jonathan at Chicago Boyz writes:

Part of what’s happening is that the economy is recovering, to some degree because the Fed is signaling that it’s going to keep suppressing short rates and buying up long-term govt debt for the foreseeable future. This is an insane policy that funnels money to Obama’s Wall Street cronies while killing low-risk investment opportunities for middle-class retirees. It seems likely to lead eventually to significant inflation. Romney, as the likely Republican nominee, should be hammering the Fed for ineptitude and corruption, for running an unsustainable monetary policy and trying to goose the markets into the election. He should be hammering Obama for trying to reinflate the credit markets to buy votes. (The residential real estate market seems to be picking up, perhaps to some degree in response to Obama’s mortgage-subsidy vote-buying scheme. But it may also be that people see inflation coming and want to exchange cash, especially borrowed cash, for real assets.)

Obama has been very bad for the country. His high tax, high regulation, high cronyism, high uncertainty policies suppress productive investment and throw vast amounts of private capital down politically favored sinkholes. Conservative and moderate/uncommitted voters alike yearn for a Republican candidate who forthrightly defends free enterprise and the opportunity society against Obama’s decadent, stratified socialist ineptocracy. Romney, the great businessman, the man who has been running for president for six or seven years, is tongue tied.

I disagree with Jonathan and the popular view of Romney’s business career. The short version is that Romney evolved into a a vulture capitalist, using debt to buy earnings and cashing out before the debt wiped out the earnings of the companies Bain Capital targeted.

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I don’t like political parties. I understand why they exist in the United States, but they ultimately serve themselves more than serving the people. But I may attend my first party caucus next week.

I want to support the Constitution and it quirky proponent, Ron Paul. He can’t win, he’s crazy, he will get us all blown up by Iranians, blah, blah blah. But if I have integrity to my belief in our Founding Principles, and if this really is The Most Important Election Ever! I must go support the candidate who best represents my view. There are no bystanders.

I knew that Minnesota’s caucus was next week, on February 7th. I hadn’t made the leap to thinking of participating. But the Ron Paul campaign sent me a letter. Nobody else has bothered to remind me or inspire me. Paul wants my vote, and I want him to have it. So, being a newbie to the party system, what is required? Where do I go?

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Our Mayor is in a contest with State electeds to see who can offer the Vikings the sweetest deal. Rybak keeps offering up new sites and new funding mechanisms, but one thing he just will not do is let the public weigh in:

And then there’s the nearly $1 billion football stadium somewhere downtown that would continue to bolster the economy.

“People pay me to look big problems in the eye and come up with a solution,” said Rybak. He said he is willing to make changes in the proposal and points out that he has already backed off the idea of funding the package with a casino on Block E and has remained flexible on the three proposed Minneapolis locations.

But he has said he is against the idea of a referendum, saying that citizens will get their chance to vote when he stands for re-election.

Everybody knows the next Mayor is going to be Gary Schiff, anyway. Schiff opposes taxpayer funding of stadia, but if R.T. signs a deal, it is too late for an election to save us.

The saying goes that without all these luxurious downtown amenities, Minneapolis would be a cold Omaha. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Our civic bigshots view our town as something bigger than it is. Like this…

H/T: Nokohaha

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If I cross Groundhog Day with railroading and view the result through a fuzzy Minneapolis filter, I see this:

For Minnesota kids, Casey Jones was a friendly TV host, named after a legendary railroad engineer.

One of the most beloved figures in local television was a man who portrayed a railroad engineer, dressed in a pin-striped jacket, cap and overalls, with a red 'kerchief around his neck, and called himself "your old buddy, Casey Jones."

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Among the week’s big headlines is Facebook’s initial public offering. They made a billion dollars last year. Karl Denninger, however, isn’t buying:

• The company identifies no particular need for the capital; it has cash. This strongly implies that the only reason to IPO is for the insiders to monetize their position. Why, if it's rapidly growing in value and there is no meaningful risk to that value vaporizing (and nobody knows better than top management if this is the case!) would the company do this now?
   
• All of the direct payments revenue are for the purchase of "virtual goods" (e.g. things on Farmville); there is no actual hard good or service delivered in exchange for money. That's not shopping, it's pretty close to burning money.  How long will that furnace keep operating?

Those are only two of his reasons. They’re enough for me.

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On January 10th there was a special election to fill vacant seat in the Minnesota Senate. Nobody noticed:

Kari Dziedzic easily won a special election on Jan. 10 to become the next state senator to represent Northeast and parts of Southeast Minneapolis.

Dziedzic (DFL) took 79 percent of the vote while Republican Ben Schwanke collected 19 percent.

In total, only 4,273 votes were cast on an unseasonably warm January day. That’s less than 10 percent of the 45,000 registered voters in Senate District 59.

Dziedzic inspired almost 8% of registered voters to bother marking her name. This is not “consent of the governed”. It is acquiescence and apathy. The election was merely a formality in installing the next generation of DFL (Democrats, to those not familiar with Minnesota peculiarities) hegemons as representatives of the Eastside.

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A few days ago, I attempted to explain a Rush Limbaugh position to neo-neocon. I was mostly successful. Neo’s general question was about Republican elites and how Limbaugh views some of the possibilities in this fall’s election.

Neo’s post began:

Lately I’ve been puzzling over a meme that’s permeated the blogosphere in connection with the rise of Newt Gingrich. You know, the one that’s all about the Republican party elites or establishment types, the puppet masters who are controlling the whole campaign (and campaigns in previous years, giving us Dole and McCain) for their own nefarious purposes, which have nothing to do with conservative ideals but are the absolute antithesis of them. And fake conservative Romney is supposedly their new front man.
…
I would have thought that Rush Limbaugh was one of these influential Republican elites, but I noticed in a couple of comments around the blogosphere that people were quoting him on the bad faith scheming of the Republican establishment, the ones who wanted Romney and didn’t want Newt.

I commented:

The GOP overlords hold that Newt Romney will lose to Obama.

Newt will polarize down-ballot, possibly even inspiring more loons like Angle and O’Donnell to win their races. The GOP elite loses control of the Senate, either outright or by the election of TEA people wearing the GOP jersey. The establishment depends on compliance.

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Mitt Romney has been unable to articulate a detailed explanation of his two terms at the helm of Bain Capital. His campaign rhetoric has not dealt with the charges against Bain’s debt-fueled “vulture capitalism”. Instead he has attempted to adopt the mantle of business and capitalism itself. He repeats that profit is a good thing, and that he will not apologize for his success.

That stuff works in a stump speech. Profit is, indeed, a good thing. Romney alludes to Adam Smith’s words:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

To a wider audience, one not already convinced of the virtue of self-interest and deeply mistrusting of the agents of corporatism, Romney’s endorsement of profit is the echo of Gordon Gekko:

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Right now, they all support positions I don’t hold.

Quoted from: Ron Paul, in an interview with CNN after South Carolina’s 2012 primary.

Since the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has stalled in the face of a popular uprising, I am stealing* this description:

The soft leftists are realizing the hard leftists meant what they said.

(*If I remembered where I read it, I would happily give credit.)

When we give government some power, we must expect it will use that power:

As for all of the people out there on the internet having a massive freak out about the government potentially damaging something they love… WELCOME TO THE PARTY.

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Borepatch brings to our attention an anniversary, with a call to action:

Brad_In_MA emails to point out that Thursday is the anniversary of the epic screwing of TJIC by the People's Soviet of Massachusetts*. He has a call to action that is filled with win:

I propose a Jan 19 BUYcott of anything 2a related, in support of TJIC. Mind putting up such a post? I plan on getting a few targets and a brick of some .22lr range ammo for my ruger 22/45, aka Miss Cherry. The idea is to BUY something. Anything. Price does not matter.  Quantity does not matter. In short, a simple request for a simple action to support a Brother in Need.

I would go one step further, and suggest a buycott (the opposite of a boycott, 'natch, where you purposely buy from someone as opposed to refusing to buy from them). As it turns out, TJIC is an entrepreneur, and has a company that makes this easy for everyone: Smartflix.

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I’m a bit late to comment on MLK Day this year. As a legendary proponent of non-violence, Reverend King is always relevant to one of my enduring questions: Why do men study war so much more than they study peace?

Any good question requires an investigation of the terms within it. What is peace? If King is held as an example, peace is certainly not without tension and strife. Peace is not calm. Not necessarily, at least.

What I had in mind for MLK Day was not one of the standard or even obscure quotes from King himself. Instead of a dream, I offer this:

Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the ability to handle conflict through peaceful means.

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Those of us who would prefer a smaller, less-intrusive government can’t put much hope in any candidate who vows to work with Congress to “get things done”. And we have to look deeper into any candidate’s promises. They like to pledge impossible things. A President cannot, for example, repeal UnicornCare no matter how many times it was stated in their stump speeches.

Congress has the power of the purse. Despite their bickerings, they have always found a way to buy each other off and to “get things done”. I don’t need bipartisanship. I need vetoes. Lots of vetoes.

Who will make the promise I want to hear?

Detroit’s failed economy stimulates failed journalism:

if Detroit has any single sector that's booming, it's playing host as the epicenter for a nation of journalists-turned-poverty tourists. Morton talks with James Griffoen, who is said to be a frequently sought out urban "sherpa" for journalists looking for a quick dose of "ruin porn."

D-Town, the place nobody wants be, but everybody wants to hear about.

Vanderleun glances at something interesting:

Ironically, a young generation that considers the struggle for same-sex marriage the civil rights struggle of its day is choosing to avoid the marital estate.

Minnesota voters will have an opportunity to define marriage this fall:

The question would be presented to voters as follows:

"Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?"

If passed, the Minnesota Constitution will be Amended:

Article XIII; Section 13.

Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota.

From all I see and ovehear, the cool kids are clearly voting “no”. Supporting gay marriage seems more about making one’s own identity than thinking through what marriage means.

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Neo-neocon and I are in another conversation about Mitt Romney. I am coming to know more about Romney’s career than I do my own.

Our arguments revolve around my contention that Mitt is a finance guy, ultimately a friend to Wall Street over Main Street. This puts me in uncomfortable agreement with Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s career with the two Bain companies.

I want to set aside the “finance guy“ part of my objections to Romney. Neo has previously argued that Mitt’s instincts are more conservative than he gets credit for. She holds that he was Governor of a pathetically leftoid State, and did the best he could (I’m paraphrasing).

I hoped to find a video of his inaugural address as Massachusetts Governor, to see what his vision was once the election was over and before the nasty task of governing began. I haven’t found it yet, but ran into the Wikipedia entry for his term as Governor. Let’s see how that strikes me.

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Frederic Bastiat, the patron saint of NRR, wrote:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Mistaking government for society is a timeless error.