Twin Cities news consumers aren’t well served, and it may get worse.

Avista Capital Partners, which owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said earlier this month that its investment in the Strib is performing so poorly that it had to be written down by 75%. Earlier, the New York Post reported the possibility that the paper might go bankrupt. That possibility will loom as long as the Strib, which many locals refer to as “Red Star Tribune,” largely serves as the apparent PR outlet of the Democratic Farm Labor Party (the Gopher State’s Democrats).

If a Strib bankruptcy were to occur, and it ceases publication, the St. Paul Pioneer Press is less than ready to step into the breach, at least if Tom Webb’s article Thursday about recent food price inflation is any indication.

Webb’s opening:

What’s up at the supermarket? Prices for almost everything

Food inflation hit an 18-year high in April, with grocery prices rising 1.5 percent for the month, the government said Wednesday. Prices rose in every aisle - dairy, breads, meats, beverages, fruits and vegetables. It means $53 more a month to feed a family of four with a typical food budget.

Jim Taranto at Best of the Web caught the obvious nonsense on Friday:

This would mean that before the 1.5% increase, the typical family of four spent $3,533 a month, or a hair under $42,400 a year, on food. No wonder America has an obesity epidemic!

I thought I would try to give the apparent best of the Pioneer Press’s Webb the benefit of the doubt, and attempted to determine where he got his figure from.

Beats me.

I went to the USDA’s web site, where it presents monthly updated costs for various levels of eating for food at home. I used the March 2008 costs at this link (PDF), and calculated the effect of a 1.5% increase using the (of course) “Liberal plan”:

I can’t for the life of me figure out where the $53 came from. Even the $911.10 in the “Moderate” column yields an answer of $13.67; if Webb erroneously double-counted and multiplied by 4, that’s still a rounded $54, not $53. Perhaps a more “creative” reader can channel Mr. Webb’s inner calculator.

Webb’s figure got past the vaunted layers of fact-checking newspapers like the Pioneer Press allegedly have.

If Webb’s numerical literacy is typical of newsrooms across America, that would go a long way towards explaining why the utter nonsense of last year’s blatantly political and breathtakingly deceptive Food Stamp Challenges received very little scrutiny, and quite a bit of blind, fawning acceptance. Time after time, in city after city, those challenges repeated the patently false assertion that recipients have only $1 per person per meal with which to buy food, when the amounts involved are 28-70% higher, depending on family size (the benefit provided is about $1 per person per meal, because calculations based on family income and assets determine how much a family has and can afford to pay out of its own resources).

Based on the Strib’s tribulations and the Pioneer Press’s apparent inadequacies, the Twin Cities would seem to be fertile ground for an enterprising fair and balanced online hard-news publication.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

The excerpt to come is from Hugh Hewitt, who in 2003 said that Mitt Romney should defy the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s Goodridge ruling, and then, inexplicably and without justification, backed off.

The excerpt to come is from Hugh Hewitt, who eventually became Mitt Romney’s go-to blog mouthpiece for the better part of two years.

The excerpt to come is from Hugh Hewitt, who, as far as I know, has said nothing about Romney’s abandonment of his duties under the constitution of Massachusetts when he unilaterally and extra-constitutionally imposed same sex marriage on the state — according to the New York Times, to keep a campaign promise to Log Cabin Republicans to “keep my head low” and “not lead a fight against same-sex marriage.”

Now, all of a sudden, Hugh Hewitt, in this excerpt, is alarmed about what transpired in California this week:

This will be an enormously important election for the future of the country. Marriage is of course a central institution that society must protect and nurture, but the idea of separation of powers and accountability for courts is also a bedrock principle of the rule of law, and it is eroding before our eyes. The California electorate will be asked to decide if it is willing to be ruled by judges, whether it will simply accept being told what they will do and when they will do it. I hope every interested citizen in the country, every religious leader fond of religious liberty, every legislator who takes his or her job seriously will grasp that the vote on the marriage amendment on the Califoria ballot is really much much more than just a marriage amendment and concerns far more than just California law –it is a vote on who rules, judges or the People, and its result will mark a decisive beginning of a rollback of judicial imperialism or a capitulation to the courts on this and on any other issue the courts decide to impose their will upon.

Where have you been, Hugh?

Same sex marriage is NOT legal in Massachusetts, and it will not be until the Massachusetts Legislature passes laws that make it so. The Court’s Goodridge ruling was an opinion, and not an order (see today’s earlier post with Gregg Jackson’s letter to the LA Times that concisely details how and why this is true).

Despite the fact that same sex marriage is not legal in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney openly broke the oath he swore to uphold, and acted as if the Court’s ruling had to be followed. It didn’t. By doing what he did, Romney gave the ruling a perception of legitimacy that it does not deserve, and proved himself objectively unfit for public office.

Now the California Supreme Court, in its same sex marriage ruling, has in effect declared a vote of the people to be unconstitutional, something that the Court does NOT have the power to do.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s response has been to say he supports the Court’s ruling — despite that fact that there’s nothing available to “obey” but the will of the people. Schwarzenegger is on the cusp of following Mitt Romney’s example by breaking his constitutional oath of office. Unless he changes his mind, California’s governor will, like Romney, have proven himself objectively unfit for public office.

Instead of criticizing Schwarzenegger for abandoning his duty to defend his state’s constitution, feckless Hugh Hewitt is advocating the passage of yet another voter-approved measure that, unless I’m missing something, the California Supreme Court will throw out on the same grounds as it did the 2000 voter initiative earlier this week. (Note: After a brief call-in to Gregg at Pundit Review radio tonight, I’m led to believe that I’m NOT missing something.)

Why should interested people mobilize, Hugh, if you and others who should know better cower in the face of mere men and women in robes who pretend to make law from the bench, and when crunch time comes, shrugs and says, “shucks, we must obey”?

When will someone, anyone, state the obvious? Court rulings are not “orders” beyond the particulars of the individual cases they rule on. If legislatures don’t pass laws that implement court rulings, the only avenue by aggrieved parties for redress is to go to the courts with a new case. The aggrieved can get dozens of individual rulings in their favor, which is fine for them, but it means nothing to anyone else until a law is passed.

John Haskins, in an e-mail earlier today, said it well, as usual:

As the California court’s Lockyer opinion (with SF mayor Gavin Newsome) stated, no member of the executive branch has authority to issue marriage licenses not authorized by California’s marriage statutes. That principle is not negated by the new opinion. In fact, this new opinion hardly pretends to negate that constitutional principle, since it is merely a declaratory judgment lacking any orders or any relief for the plaintiffs. Therefore, no member of the executive branch, no town or city clerk, nor any JP is authorized to proceed differently unless the people’s initiative marriage statute is revoked, which can only be done by the people.

The Founders made it pretty simple: They denied the judiciary the power of the sword. No judge or team of judges can do the slightest thing to enforce their own opinions. They can jump up and down and pee in their pants, but they can’t enforce their opinions. That is left entirely to the executive branch, which swears in the Holy name of Almighty God to:
– uphold our constitutions, including their strict and very clear separation of powers
– execute statutes.

No servant of the people swears any oath to enforce any court opinion. EVER.

The author of “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies,” one of the two stellar bloggers at at Pundit Review, and co-host of “Pundit Review Radio” on WRKO in Boston, laid it out for the LA Times. Don’t bet the house on the Times printing it.

“Conservatives” who supported the candidacy of Objectively Unfit Mitt Romney for President, many of whom continue to encourage John McCain to take him on as VP, should be ashamed of themselves. The shocking part of all of this is that they know that what Jackson says below is true. I have personally verified this in the case of one very well-known “conservative”; others have sufficient legal grounding that they surely understand it, yet they ignore it.

Memo to conservative talkers and others who are still on the Romney bandwagon, or were during the primaries: Your non-stop advocacy on behalf of Romney just had consequences this week. Your failure to acknowledge the disastrously irresponsible role you have played to this point is a stain on your reputations.

THE LETTER

Foundational links:
- The Massachusetts Constitution.
- The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts’s Goodridge decision.

The LA Times article to which Gregg refers is already archived. For fair use and discussion purposes, I obtained the article from the ProQuest library database, and have posted about half of it here at my host.

One clarification: While I agree with Gregg’s characterization that efforts to codify same sex marriage in Massachusetts were “defeated” (i.e., “turned back”), the bills involved were technically put under a “study order” (H1710; S918), which appears to be a form of legislative limbo. I would suggest, but someone would have to confirm, that the bills never came to the floor of their respective chambers for an up-or-down vote either because the votes weren’t there, or because the legislators didn’t want to be forced to go on the record. If the result of this Boston Globe search on “gay marriage law” (without quotes) is any indication, the press in Massachusetts appears not to have covered the progress, or lack thereof, of these bills at all.

So here is Gregg’s letter (other links and the blockquotes within his letter were added by me; bolds and italics are in the original):

+++++++++++++++++++++

Same Sex Marriage is NOT legal in Massachusetts or California!

Your above the fold headline in today’s LA Times, “Massachusetts lives happily with same-sex marriage law,” by Elizabeth Mehren is totally inaccurate and misleading, and it is vital that you clarify this error for your readers.

The truth is that “same sex marriage” is not legal in Massachusetts which is why only about a month ago legislation was introduced to amend the current Massachusetts marriage statute (chapter 207) to legalize “same sex marriage.” (H1710 and S918) which were both defeated. This alone disproves your inaccurate headline!

Under the Massachusetts’ Constitution, the oldest functioning constitution in the world authored by John Adams, which served as the model for our Federal Constitution:

“[T]he people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent.” (PART THE FIRST, Article X.)

And “the people” via their elected representatives never “consented” to “same sex marriage.” The current marriage statute was never amended or suspended and to this day doesn’t include a provision for “same sex marriages.”

Many, including former Governor Romney, have claimed that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, “legalized same sex marriage” in issuing their Goodridge opinion in 2003, and that he was “ordered to enforce the law.” Both assertions are totally false.

Even the Goodridge Court admitted that their opinion in no way “legalized” same sex “marriage”:

“Here, no one argues that striking down the marriage laws is an appropriate form of relief.”

In fact, they admitted that under the statute, Chapter 207 of the Massachusetts General Laws, homosexual marriage is illegal:

“We conclude, as did the judge, that M.G.L. c. 207 may not be construed to permit same-sex couples to marry.”

The truth is that the Goodridge declaratory opinion should have been declared null and void since the court lacked the subject matter jurisdiction under Article V to even hear the case:

“All causes of marriage…shall be heard and determined by the governor and council, until the legislature shall, by law, make other provision.” (PART THE SECOND, Ch. III, Article V.)

Although many “conservative” lawyers and pundits have claimed that the “activist MSJC Court” legalized “same sex marriage,” it was the acting governor Mitt Romney, a “conservative” Republican who illegally ordered the Department of Public Health to change the marriage certificates from “husband” and “wife” to “partner A” and “partner B” and ordered Justices of the Peace and Town Clerks to solemnize and perform same sex marriage ceremonies or resign (which one did). Romney did this without an accompanying legal statute and in doing so violated his sworn oath to uphold and enforce the Constitution and the laws and statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

That being said, while it was Romney, not the court, who was solely responsible for installing “same sex marriage,” the certificates that Romney issued (over 150 of them he personally issued) are not worth the paper they are written on because they lack an accompanying enabling statute that recognizes “same sex marriage” and are therefore, according to the Massachusetts Constitution, null and void.

The truth is that according to the highest law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Constitution, “same sex marriage” is not “legal.”

Nor is “same sex marriage” “legal” in California. The citizens in California approved a voter initiative to define marriage as between one man and one woman in 2000. The judiciary lacks the requisite constitutional authority to overturn any statute passed by the voters. Only the voters themselves can reverse a statute they themselves voted in. While the court is free to interpret the constitution of California and issue opinions, they are not authorized to “strike down” any specific statutes. It is vital that you acknowledge that “same sex marriage” is not legal in California either or prove that it is. Neither the people nor their elected representatives voted to amend or suspend the current marriage statute that doesn’t allow for “same sex marriage.” Until they do, it remains illegal.

You have an solemn obligation to acknowledge these facts and run a retraction for your readers. Anything less is journalistic and legal malpractice.

Looking forward to seeing if you choose to run this letter.

Sincerely,

Gregg Jackson
Los Angeles, CA

For more information on how “same sex marriage” is not “legal” in Massachusetts go here:
– Joint Letter to Governor Mitt Romney from Pro-Family Leaders; December 22, 2006
– And here: http://www.robertpaine.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________

RELATED: “Still Illegal Coast to Coast“

Howard Wilkinson’s underlying story of Duke Heller and Eddie Van Oliver Jr. (”More than a number — Duke Heller made sure vet’s sacrifice wasn’t lost to history”) is here. It will open in a new window, so you won’t lose your place. Go there.

This is the full text of a Saturday Cincinnati Enquirer editorial:

It may have taken us 39 years to learn Eddie Van Oliver Jr.’s story, but now that we’ve heard it we will never forget it.

As reporter Howard Wilkinson recounted in a story that captures the classic tragedies and loyalties created by war, Eddie was just 19 when he was killed serving as point man for his Marine platoon in Vietnam.

All that died that day in 1969 in the jungle, we will never be able to say. His life seemed as if it were just getting started.

But however long or short it is, the life of a fallen warrior is a full arc. It is a life of service so complete, of sacrifice so unselfish that, while other lives are measured in years and months, these lives are measured in brave acts and intentions, and never found wanting.

Duke Heller knew such a life should not be forgotten.

Duke was a young Marine himself, a Cleves native who had never heard of Eddie’s West End neighborhood, so limited were both young men’s experiences.

The day Eddie died, Duke and his fellow Marines undertook a mission most of us could not have completed. They wrapped Eddie’s body in a poncho and carried him for nearly a week so he could leave behind that jungle and come home.

A few years later during a visit to Spring Grove Cemetery, Duke learned that return was to a numbered grave, with no acknowledgement of the sacrifice Eddie had made.

Duke never forgot Eddie but he knew that without some memorial, very few people would ever know his story. Duke worked to secure a government grave marker but got only frustration. But after he told Eddie’s story to Jeff Foran, an Air Force veteran and VFW post commander who knew his way around the bureaucracy, the oversight was set to rights.

The marker was put in place earlier this week. A memorial ceremony is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday at the cemetery.

The pain underlying this story is palpable. The loss of a 19-year-old man, the “what-ifs” of a grieving family, the young Marine’s fears that materialized and the hopes that never will.

But woven with that pain is evidence of the best in human nature.

It is the bond that, in some of the worst moments of their lives, human beings sometimes wordlessly unite with each other.

Eddie and Duke knew each other only briefly, but long enough to understand that they were both Marines and Americans and, in those shared associations, had some obligation to each other.

It took 39 years, but Duke kept up his end.

Two young Cincinnatians went off to war 40 years ago. They both came home heroes.

If you didn’t click the link above, go here for Howard Wilkinson’s story.