Speed Gibson

My response to "Why Mommy is a Democrat"

She’s at the rallies, in her tin-foil hat
She never spanks, her kid is a brat
She loves Bill Clinton, wishes he could come back
That's why the lady’s Democrat

Doesn't like NASCAR, attends soccer instead
She drives a hybrid, uses Ethanol blends
Won’t go to Keegan’s, would rather watch Friends
That’s why the lady’s Democrat

She loves Oprah, Al, MPR on the air
Life without prayer
New views? Won't do!
She shares her toys, makes you share yours, too
That's why the lady’s Democrat

Doesn’t like talking, where facts are involved
Can’t say from where, her views just evolved
When programs don’t work, she’s somehow absolved
That's why the lady’s Democrat

As I was driving home Monday, already feeling the onset of illness, I heard the old Going Up the Country joyfully shooting out of my car audio. "Yay!" I shouted, thinking that Hugh Hewitt had given up on what I think is the worst show opening in all of talk radio. It's poorly edited, muddy, and dark, more of a dirge than the etherial call to arms he imagines it to be. Oh, and don't forget the incongruous few bars of Toby Keith stuck on the front with no transition.

But then I remembered it was President's Day, and that this was probably an old show being rebroadcast, and it was. Still, it was so uplifting to hear that theme again.

I think I'm going to write Hewitt this weekend and plead not only for the old theme, but the old Hugh. He still has his moments, but fewer of them, and there's just no time left for fun anymore, as in domestic issues. It's all international politics and the War on Terror. Also, it seems that all I'm hearing is one interview after another, with ever less "quality time" for just Hugh and callers.

But the first change I want is the return of what was one of the best opening themes in talk radio.

The Bankruptcy Court was supposed to rule last Friday on whether Northwest Airlines could escape their current labor contracts with the pilots and flight attendants. Then it was supposed to be today. Now it's next Wednesday.

I don't know know whether it will be a lock-out, a crippling strike, or outright liquidation, but I can confidently predict Northwest will cease operations at exactly 5:01 pm CST on Friday, March 17. This is because we hold tickets to fly south the next day. The travel gnomes will time this to make re-scheduling nearly impossible and/or very expensive.

Even if we should get on board, I'll want to check the fuel gauges before take-off.

Proper blog protocol seems to be to announce one's infirmities at the outset, warning of little or no blogging. I'll do better next time, as I am now about over a "lower G.I. flu" that hit me on Monday.

***

There I was, all but helpless on the couch having to watch American Idol's two big rounds of twelve. Paula loved almost everyone as usual, Simon about the opposite as usual. But I'd sure like to have some of whatever's messed up Randy Jackson's senses to take my mind off my symptoms. I know he has to keep the producers and the sponsors happy, but puh-leeze! They could eliminate all but about four singers right now.

***

I read that Lawrence Summers resigned as President of Harvard University. I thought he should have been released last summer when he caved to the liberal shrieking about his carefully worded but earnest observation that there just may be some differences between men and women when it comes to academics and choice of career. Ironically, he is now forced to quit because he isn't liberal enough, as in well to the left of Alan Dershowitz as I heard on Hugh Hewitt tonight.

Once again, as in so many areas of life, we see that appeasement doesn't work.

We now have four two hour programs that are must-listen or at least must-record or must-catch-replay.

• The Patriot Insider with Patrick Campion featuring Mark Yost and Craig Westover, 9-11 on the Patriot
• Northern Alliance Radio Network I with Brian "St. Paul" Ward, John Hinderaker, and Chad the Elder, 11-1 on the Patriot
• Northern Alliance Radio Network II with Mitch Berg, "Captain" Ed Morrisey, and King Banaian, 1-3 on the Patriot
• Taxpayers League Live with David Strom and Margaret Martin, 12-2 on KTLK-FM

Unfortuately, the latter overlaps the NARN, but the NARN shows are replayed starting at 9 pm Sunday nights.

I look forward to these shows every week. I record the Patriot Insider and Taxpayers League Live, and generally listen to the NARN live, filling in with the replay as necessary. We in the Twin Cities are truly blessed to have such talented and responsible citizens go out of their way to work for a better Minnesota, each in their own way.

One thing I like in particular is that they are all two hours. With rare exceptions like Rush Limbaugh, third hours seldom match the first two hours. I record Joe Soucheray's first two hours only, knowing hour three is a throwaway.

Now if only we could get podcasts! Powerline's Hinderaker is experimenting, but last I checked, the links don't work.

I had heard several tell me that KFAN had a morning show and they did more than just sports. This is true, I found out. Also, their ratings are respectable. The Power Trip runs from 6 to 9 each morning. The time breakout is:

  Sports              27%

  Commercials         23%

  Banter              14%

  Miscellaneous       10%



  Grammy Awards        7%

  Movies               6%

  Music                5%

  News                 3%

  Twins Stadium        3%

  Traffic              2%

The Sports segments above for my three day sample were allocated thusly:

  Timberwolves        34%

  Super Bowl          21%

  NBA                 12%

  Olympics             6%

  Gambling Ring        4%

  Twins Stadium        3%

  NFL                  3%

  Gopher football      2%

  Vikings              1%

  Wild                 0%

  Twins                0%

  All other           14%

It was the week after the Super Bowl, so clearly some stories were still forthcoming, such as for the TV ratings. The Timberwolves received more attention with LeBron James coming to town. They discussed the 'Wolves disappointing performances of late several times. The Wild aren't playing particularly well either, but the expectation isn't there.

Sports are slow now, with no baseball or football. March madness isn't here yet. NASCAR is just starting. They could have talked a little golf, but chose not to. Still, they are a sports station, and could have done more, both in quantity and in quality. Only the Timberwolves got some quality analysis and discussion.

So fine, they didn't spend all that much time on sports, not as much as you might expect on a sports station. Instead they did the Grammy Awards, some pop music, and some movies, plus a few "Willie Clark" news of the weird items. This wasn't a good choice, as I found them totally unconvincing as music or movie critics. They had their individual opinions as to why they liked one song or movie and didn't like another. They didn't, perhaps couldn't, tell you why they did, or suggest why you might. It was little more than banter, and there's plenty of that already.

My biggest issue is the talent, mostly with "the Superstar" Mike Morris. He was continually gruff, even surly at times, as if he wasn't getting enough sleep. He sounded like he was bored with the show. This surprised me a bit, as I've always enjoyed his work on the Vikings post-game call-in show. There he stays calm, gives good insight, and goes very easy on blaming any one player or group for those many disappointing losses. Here on the Power Trip, he is Mr. Hyde.

His cohorts aren't much help, fine if you're just doing sports, but over-matched for a more general show. I can only surmise that Kelly Guest's departure was significant, and that they had better find a replacement soon.

As of now, this show is right down there with Willie Clark. Even if you really like sports, this is difficult to listen to.

First, I will not be voting again for Pawlenty, for the many reasons I have stated many times. Neither will I vote for a DFL, Green, or any other urban socialist candidate. The Impaler has some unfinished court business, so that leaves Independence Party Peter Hutchinson and Libertarian Sue Jeffers. Being realistic about Jeffers' chances, I was hopeful that Peter Hutchinson would, yes, probably get a lot of things wrong, but would get our State spending under control. He has long arguing for a hard prioritization of spending by category and purpose, fully funding the important, and eliminating what isn't. He claims to have done this in Washington State.

In Tuesday's Minneapolis Star Tribune, Peter Hutchinson was too honest for his own good in giving Governor Pawlenty some advice on his State of the State speech. I read it, then I read it twice more, once as a liberal and again as a conservative.

Reading it as a liberal, I saw nothing I didn't like. There was no talk of sacrifice or either-or. All programs will continue and many will significantly increase. Consider just these two points:

• Doubling the odds that our ninth-graders will become college grads -- that, more than anything else, will fire up our economic engine.


• World-class health at the lowest cost in the nation; better health, better care for every Minnesotan -- that will get this job-killer off our backs.

Reading it as a conservative, I saw plenty to disagree with, including the above points. Most ominous is this simple conservative-baiting:

• Don't raise the 5 G's: guns, gays (marriage), God, gambling and gynecology. You would raise these things only if this were a political campaign speech and you wanted to get your "base" riled up.

That the word "base" is in quotes erased any last thought that Hutchinson was truly above it all.

Other bloggers have already written off Hutchinson as just another lefty. I did my best to keep an open mind, hoping for a real leader with real management skills and the sense to use them properly. But the bloggers were correct. Hutchinson is just another lefty, whose first act of real honesty should be to get in the DFL race with the others of his kind.

So as of now, I am left with Sue Jeffers. There must be a better way to say that, like, I would be supporting her now if she were in the GOP race, if there were one.

But Peter Hutchinson, you're fired!

Policy Guy, quoted a Wall Street Journal artice, wonders if our retirement and health care plans are at a tipping point. Traditionally, these have been "defined benefit" (e.g., pensions, HMO's) plans from employers and government. There has been a major shift In the private sector at least, the shift to "defined contribution" for retirement sayings (e.g., 401K's) is well-accepted and popular. Many Americans are now asking how at least some of their Social Security taxes could also become a tangible retirement asset. Some fear for Social Security's solvency, some dislike the "you must be present to win" payouts, and everyone wishes the return on investment was at least comparable to private plans.

Medical coverage has gone through the transition from fee-for-service to mostly HMO (health maintenance organization), but is still basically "defined benefit" in nature. The best "defined contribution" equivalent is the Health Savings Account (HSA). The money your employer would otherwise pay the HMO is instead "given" to the employee to manage. The employee must purchase catastrophic coverage from an insurance company for major maladies like cancer and appendicitis. The balance is for the small expenses such as exams, prescriptions, treating accidents, etc. What you don't spend is yours to keep or carry over.

This is what President Bush calls the "Ownership Society" meaning that we own our retirement and health care, not the government, and not the employer. You can change jobs much more readily, and our high-tech society means, yes, we will change jobs several times throughout our career, even change careers.

These trends should continue, for as PolicyGuy notes:

"Simply put, government and corporate policy have for a long time fostered a corporate cost structure (and government cost structure) that cannot be sustained any longer."

But things could tip another way.

The Federal Government set up the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) in 1974 to "insure" private corporate and union pension plans. It charges premiums that provide the additonal assets needed when taking over underfunded plans. Large bankruptcies and market conditions have significantly strained this program, and guess what Congress wants to do? Raise the premiums, in effect a tax increase paid through higher prices.

Meanwhile, both Social Security and Medicare have trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, not to mention all the public sector pension plans and Medicaid that are also in trouble. With Democrats applauding their own inaction and obstruction on bringing Social Security into the 21st century at the last State of the Union, further tax hikes seem inevitable.

Much as bloated government-run public schools preclude many parents' ability to choose alternatives, we may just find ourselves unable to take full advantage of any of 401K's and HSA's in the future.

After decades of dominance, WCCO 830 AM is still a major brand in Twin Cities radio. As Soucheray once observed, many kitchen radios tuning knobs were so caked with rust and cooking grease that it was impossible to change the station away from the Good Neighbor.

Many of us remember mornings with Maynard Speece, Roger Erickson, Howard Viken, and Charlie Boone. Those easy-going days of farm reports, the morning hymm, the CBS World News Roundup at 7 am, and Joyce Lamont are all but gone, replaced by a frenetic concatenation of 30 to 90 second segments. The breakdown of my three day, twelve hour sample:

  Commercials         35%

  News                26%

  Sports              11%

  Entertainment News  10%

  Weather              6%

  Traffic              5%

  Banter               4%

  Other                3%

This broadcast is clearly aimed at the commuter who might hear 20 minutes or so. Weather and traffic are given every ten minutes. That and the commercials take up nearly half the time right there. As such, Host Dave Lee doesn't get the air time most morning hosts receive.

That 26% is news is commendable, and it's the best quality radio news on the dial. You get 3 minutes of CBS news (quiet out there!) and 4 minutes of local news at the top of each hour. But most of that is repetition across the four hours. If you boil down the non-commercial content to eliminate the repeated information, you have about 45 minutes or so of content each day.

Dave Lee also does play by play for Gopher football and basketball, and that's basically what he does here, calling the action as the board operators hurriedly switch from one segment to the next. Given that assignment, I think he does a good job.

If you want a quick recap of what's going on, WCCO is your best choice in the morning. But if you have the morning off, "traffic and weather together on the eight's" will either bore you or annoy you. Listen for 20 minutes, then put on some music.

Next up: KFAN's Power Trip with "The Superstar" Mike Morris.

Mayor Chris Coleman and Council will soon be adopting the Kyoto protocol for St. Paul. As the Night Writer observed, the only real way to do this is to evacuate the city, the Smoking Ban being an excellent first start.

I did a little arithmetic. Given the size of St. Paul and the average wind speed, St. Paul typically gets a complete air change once an hour, and the Earth has hundreds of years of supply to provide them. Given how air is mixed, naturally polluted, naturally cleansed, and otherwise affected by civilization, the effect of Coleman's policy simply cannot be measured for thousands of years, if ever.

As I noted, my review of Wendy Wilde could not be completed for lack of evidence - the show was cancelled that very week. I have moved on to doing the WCCO morning program with Dave Lee. This is what I call "Short Attention Span" theatre, meaning it takes some extra time to work through it. Meanwhile, I'll be recording the KFAN Power Trip this week, with MPR (Cathy Wurzer) next week. When I'm done with the other morning shows, I'll see if AM 950 has a new offering.

I will also soon be reviewing the new FM version of Taxpayers League Live and the new "Patriot Insider" that took its AM place. I do have one immediate comment on the later.

Sorry Chumley, but you need a new theme song. Johnny Cash is great, but try a different cut. Also, the bumper music was really lame this week. Aside from that, you're off to a good start.

That's what President Bush proposed in his 2006 State of the Union speech, specifically 70,000 new mathematics and science teachers over the next five years. It won't happen.

President Clinton's 100,000 new police program actually produced somewhere between 10,000 and 17,000. Most of the money was simply swallowed up by the big city machines, knowing full well that neither the Administration nor the press would verify the results. In fact, both kept using the "100,000 cops" phrase throughout the rest of the 1990's.

The problem with hiring more mathematics and science teachers is that they cost more money than English and Social Studies teachers. Their basic skills are more valuable to private industry, i.e., they can make more money there, often a lot more money. This is anathema to the teachers unions and their equal pay for all subjects contracts. They cannot wander far from their "steps and lanes" pay grades without embracing the idea that market forces, and by extension, merit, must be honored as well.

In Minnesota, our share will be a little over 1,000 new teachers. Where would they come from? They could be education majors that shift their focus to the sciences. But the Education colleges at most universities are their academic ghettos, per economists Dr. Thomas Sowell, Dr. Walter E. Williams, and others. They have the lowest average SAT scores going in and the lowest average GRE scores coming out. Given the rigors of scientific training, they're just not likely to succeed.

They can be recruited coming out of college, and perhaps the draw of excellent benefits, job security, and long vacations will be appealing to some to the point where they'll pass on that better-paying job at 3M or Medtronic. Again, that doesn't seem likely. Even if they hire on, the call of "real" engineering will have many of these jumping ship later. Several professionals I have worked with over the years did start out as teachers, in fact, and quit because there was no real future in it.

So, again, how do you hire the scientifically over-qualified to use only a fraction of their ability? And in a system that does not reward extra effort or actual results? And with an old-fashioned pension plan - no stock options, no profit sharing, not even a 401K plan?

What's we'll likely see is all that money diverted into "staff development" and "instructional aides" programs. We'll help get your Chemistry teacher a Master's degree, even though what she learns there will be years beyond what the students can understand. The aides will count as the headcount increase.

It may not even be this complicated. After Senator Kennedy writes in all the loopholes, they just might spend the money any way they want, as they are already planning to do with Q-comp.

A new Saturday morning show from 9-11 has sprouted on WWTC 1280 AM, the Patriot Insider hosted Patrick Campion, and featuring Mark Yost and Craig Westover. This week, with Mark away, we heard an hour each on eminent domain and the smoking bans. The new Taxpayers League Live on KTLK 100.3 did a similar eminent domain debate and both were well done.

The smoking ban hour featured St. Paul Councilmember Dave Thune (pro) and Hennepin County Commissioner Penny Steele (con). I doubt if any minds were changed, but it was great insight into the "thinking" of Dave Thune.

As you know, Craig Westover, even I in my own small way, have been after Bob Moffitt of the Lung Association to provide one competent piece of supporting evidence. He has provided none so far, and neither did Thune here. In fact, his reasoning was remarkable chutzpah:

1. I am admittedly terrible with math and statistics, so I am therefore justified in using other means to evaluate the "mountain" of evidence on second-hand smoke.
2. What better means than common sense? Whose common sense? Why, mine, of course!

His common sense is basically that if first-hand smoke is bad for you, second-hand smoke is, too. And if the hospitality trade won't do the right thing, he will.

Common sense suggests to CW that if there is indeed a mountain of evidence, Thune or Moffitt should be able to provide several examples. But so far, the number provided is zero.

Common sense suggests to me that if 38,000 people are dying annually from prolonged exposure to second-hand smoke, you should be able to produce some Death Certificates to that effect. So far, none, and umbrage for asking such a question. (Hint: they're in the same drawer with "hit by a comet.")

In fact, we should be stepping over all the corpses from the times when twice as many people smoked, and smoking was acceptable almost everywhere. There should have been 100,000 a year or more dying from second-hand smoke thirty years ago. Somehow, that didn't make the papers, let alone the New England Journal of Medicine.

Trying to reason above this level proved pointless, probing the justified role of government when the risk is 100% avoidable for example. All that got was a "Halliburton" response, with Thune claiming his opposition parrots "Big Tobacco." Everyone else in the studio howled in protest. This was where a referee would have stopped the fight.

My favorite definition of politics is "the acquisition of wealth or power without merit." Thune was soundly thrashed in this debate, unable to answer simple questions, unable to support his own claims, and unmoved by the resulting personal tragedies. Yet, he has the power to enforce his vision, one we're just too stupid to comprehend.