Author Archives: Mitch Berg

NARN In The Hour Of Chaos

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Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

  • I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  We’ll be talking about Nelson Mandela, the Vikings stadium, the Vikings, and heaven only knows what else.
  • Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
  • Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is  back!  Brad’ll have Marty Seifert on the show.  “The Closer” airs from 1-3 Sundays!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

Join us!

Inclusive

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This law purports to require society to be structured around the lowest common denominator but discriminates against people in comas, and those in an iron lung, and quadriplegics. Why are Canucks such haters?

Do they also require keys to be huge, like the key to a medieval church door, so frail hands get more leverage to turn them?

Is there no limit to societal engineering downward?

Joe Doakes

I’d suggest “dealing with crappy software” as one counterexample.

Mandela

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There’s little I can say about the passing of Nelson Mandela that many others haven’t already said better.

I watched a little of CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage yesterday – and was struck not so much by the elegiac coverage of Mandela and his life (deservedly so) as by the ninety seconds’ revisionist hate hate that the likes of Christiane Amanpour were directing back at Ronald Reagan.

Of course, history records the fact that Reagan opposed legislation that would have confronted the Pretoria government over apartheid. It was the only veto of his that the Democrats ever overrode.

The left has tried to portray this as racism, then and now.

That, of course, relies on hindsight.

The ANC was far from above terrorist activity, before and during Mandela’s imprisonment; his wife Winnie was fingered in numerous murders, kidnappings, assaults and other human rights violations, and she vocally endorsed the practice of “necklacing” political opponents (jamming a car tire around them and lighting them on fire – a particularly hideous form of premeditated murder).

If a group using rhetoric like the ANC’s were operating in the US today, being on Janet Napolitano’s watch list would be the least of their legal worries.

And the track record of Mandela’s contemporaries was pretty ghastly. Robert Mugabe’s revolt against white rule was successful – at the price of pretty much destroying Zimbabwe, which remains a less onerous place then North Korea today only because of the incompetence of the state’s agents. Other similar nationalists in places like Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Angola and the Congo/Zaire created vastly more trouble than they solved.

So Mandela’s greatest accomplishment was not that he toppled white rule – that was going to happen eventually one way or another, by war, ballot or negotiation. It was that he managed to do it without plunging South Africa into the nightmarish miasma of misery that’s attended the rule of virtually all of his contemporaries; that he and the transitional government he led accomplished the job of changing South Africa without descending into (much of) the orgy of retributive violence that greeted the assumption of black rule in Zimbabwe, or the wholesale destruction of economies, societies and uncounted masses of lives in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and a raft of other sub-Saharan nations.

Reagan, it is fair to say, got Mandela wrong. It is not, however, fair to say there wasn’t ample precedent for believing South Africa could have turned out much worse than it did.

And the post-apartheid story is not only still being written – it’s not that great for South Africa. The ANC’s post-Mandela leadership has proved corrupt and incompetent. As most of sub-Saharan Africa slowly claws it’s way to sustainability, South Africa is in economic decline. Hindsight in view of South Africa’s current reality makes Mandela look as much a hero of principled competence as the statuesque moral lesson that’s leading all the newscasts today.

Which is a great elegy for a historic hero; that his reality match his legend.

Continue reading →

The Liberal Laundry

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In yet another Berg’s Seventh Law violation, Minnesota conservative activists noted that the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota – the attack-PR firm supported by the unions and Alita Messinger, which was trying to dig on Scott Honour for not releasing his tax information – hadn’t released its tax or donor information yet.

It’s worse still in Wisconsin; a liberal-controlled county launched a shakedown of Wisconsin conservative groups, in order to find out their donors to target them for future harassment.

And this seems to be a national pattern; liberal groups caterwauling about “lack of transparency” in conservative groups, while themselves keeping their donor lists secret:

Two weeks ago, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy kicked off a national campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous contributors to conservative groups in an effort to unseat the GOP governor here.

Now the group may have to answer embarrassing questions about its own finances….CMD lists no donors on its tax returns, but its website identifies numerous financial backers without any financial data. Several are highlighted in bold and labeled “current donors.” But one important name is missing: Schwab.

Read the whole thing.

Blood Money

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama-care has more holes than Swiss cheese, the latest one being something called “risk corridors” that give DHS the power to pay extra to insurers who lost money on Obama-care policies.

No, those extra payments weren’t figured into the original cost, but it’s okay – the taxpayers can make up the difference.

In other words, corporate kickbacks will cover the unexpected costs of underwriting Democrat campaigns as the public catches on to the massive fraud the President played on them last election.  Donations from insurers to Democrats will be refunded via risk corridors, sort of like the incest that goes on between NPR and the DFL with Minnesota tax dollars.

Joe Doakes

The whole thing is diabolically ingenious.  Like Al Capone’s financial network.

Colorado Thugly

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Remember – Berg’s Seventh Law has no known exceptions. 

When you have people like Heather Martens – who has never made a substantive true statement in her entire career – and Michael Paymar saying they feel intimidated by gun owners bringing legaly-owned, permitted firearms into the Capitol, you may be certain it’s to draw attention away from the American Left’s inherently thuggish approach to, well, everything. 

And you’d be right to assume it. 

Otherwise, it’d be called “Berg’s Seventh Theory”. 

 

Open Letter To Minimum Wage Strikers

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To:  All you folks “striking” for a $15/hour minimum wage
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Money from nothing

“Protesters”,

Today, you’ll be out and about around dozens of McDonalds, Taco Bells, WalMart and other low-wage employers.

I saw one of you on “Today” this morning; a cute, blonde, twenty-something single mother (what else?) and front-counter worker who notes for the camera that sometimes she has to choose between work clothes and bus fare.

I feel for you.  I do.  Twenty-odd years ago, I was in my twenties, had a couple of kids and a $7/hour job.  It was hard making ends meet.  Really, really hard. 

Of course, it was hard because of choices I’d made, not my diabolical employers.  I’d devoted myself to my first career – radio, which paid really badly, too - with a monastic intensity.  That career crashed – and it took me a few years to realize it. 

And after a year of floundering, I got the aforementioned $7/hour crummy job. 

Where I learned a couple of things; how to work in an office.  How to use a computer (that wasn’t something people were born doing back then).  How to work days instead of nights. 

I had made a few good choices, of course; when I was a teenager, I’d stayed in school and learned a few useful things, and kept it in my pants long enough to get through college (with a BA in English, which was no more a ticket to wealth then than it is today). 

Point being, that lousy $7/hour job was how I found my next job for $9/hour.  And thence got into technical writing.  And then into the career I have. 

And if that $7/hour job had gone away because legal document coders had decided to strike for $12 an hour, causing most of the crummy entry level jobs to be eliminated, where would I be today? 

The same place you’ll  be if they double the minimum wage for working the counter.

By the way, the woman on “Today” also parroted the same thing I’ve heard from ostensibly smarter liberals: without workers, there’d be no business.

That’s 180 degrees wrong, of course; without the business, there’d be no jobs. Don’t believe me?  Let’s try a quick thought experiment.  Find a vacant lot somewhere.  Put on a fast food uniform, and stand there saying “May I help you?”   Wait – where’s the burgers?  Where are the customers?  Where’s the counter and the till?  Where’s the building? 

What?  The SEIU goons behind the “strikes” never mentioned this?

Huh.

Even More Sisyphean

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Hundreds of peoples’ battles with Healthcare.gov; in this case, getting switched to  higher-cost, higher-deductible plans, with no further questions asked:

If you have an insurance plan that isn’t compatible with the Affordable Care Act, your insurance company might be automatically rolling you into the plan “most similar” to your own.

For one Washington state resident interviewed by The Daily Caller, his new “Bronze” plan is 80 percent more expensive for him and his wife. His wife is paying $220 more and he’s paying $150 more with higher deductibles.

The insurers are sending letters to subscribers when their existing plans juuuuust didn’t provide all the goodies they didn’t want to pay for in the first place, telling them that it was the insurance company’s best guess, and to check in if they want to downgrade. 

“It’s a confusing thing for people. Most of the plans didn’t contain all the provisions that were under the law. We had no choice,” [Rachelle Cunningham strategic communications manager for insurance company RegenceBlueShield ] said. “We’re trying to make it clear for them.”

Fearless prediction:  not a few Obamacare defenders among the pundosphere will chalk this up to stupid customers.

Buck Passed

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The old Sears Roebuck building on Lake Street in Minneapolis was converted into Midtown Global Market, an indoor bazaar.  It’s been losing money for years.  Now the mayor wants another $1.8 million to bail them out.

 

Look, Mr. Mayor:  if the project can’t make enough money to fund its own operations, it’s not a business: it’s a hobby.  The City has no business funding hobbies.

 

Granted, it’s Minneapolis, so I don’t care what they do in their own town.  But whatever Minneapolis does, St. Paul wants to do, like a younger brother who whines “How come I didn’t get a train?”  Throwing cold water on damn-foolishness is wise, no matter where it occurs.

 

Joe Doakes

That, and the bill is eventually going to be passed on to taxpayers in Moorhead, Wilmar and Lakeville (and any left in Saint Paul) via Local Government Aid.

Which is, of course, why we have Local Government Aid – so the citizens of Minneapolis can continue to be gulled into thinking their government is doing its job with the tax money they extract for life in the city.

The Democrat War On Science

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Kevin Williamson concludes:

But the next time you hear a chorus of “Hooray, science!” from the Left, ask them why Barack Obama’s signature health-care program is going to recognize theworst sort of quackery and pseudoscience, with no more regard for the scientific record than the most fervid young-Earth creationist, swami, or snake-handler.

Williamson is writing about the fact that Obamacare specifically covers naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture, “sciences” with no more scientific basis than Christian prayer therapy (which is not covered, by the way).

Read the whole journey to the conclusion.

Goalposts

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The number of Americans filing for unemployment dropped.  The headline makes this sound good but it’s actually not.

Look at it this way: suppose there are 100 people in the economy and 7 get laid off.  That’s an unemployment rate of 7%.

Now there are 93 people working.  If 7% get laid off again, that’s 6 more people out of work.  True – fewer people are getting laid off (only 6 instead of 7) but that’s because there are fewer people working to GET laid off.  The measure of a healthy economy is not how many people are out of work, it’s how many people who want to work, can find work.

The Labor Force Participation Rate has dropped so low that fewer than 63 people are working out of every 100 living in America.  The other 38 are out of work, out of unemployment benefits and have quit looking for work.  That’s the lowest percentage of working Americans since Jimmy Carter was in office.  That’s the tax base we’re expecting to pay for Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obama-care, student financial aid, foreign aid, farm aid, light rail and oh, yes, fighting wars in a dozen countries.

Joe Doakes

It is not necessary for people to return to work. It is necessary that the media make people think people are returning to work.

Thus racism.

How ObamaCare Is Not Like World War Two

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A liberal of my acquaintance didn’t so much defend ObamaCare in Twitter as much as he spoke up for that can-do American talent for fixing things.

@[redacted]: @mitchpberg Just finished watching “Band of Brothers” for the umpteenth time.Ultimately Americans are good at making things work.

He followed up:

@[redacted]: @mitchpberg If we could produce a hundred thousand warplanes in a couple of years, why would you think we couldn’t make a website work?

We Americans are indeed good at fixing things. We fixed Europe – surely we can fix a website. Right?

Maybe. But if we’d fought WWII the way we’re socializing healthcare, we’d have drafted all the forty-to-sixty-year-olds, and then simultaneously invaded every nation on earth.

And Now I Feel Old

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The co-star of the book Hunt For Red October  - which came out thirty years ago this coming year – was the USS Dallas, a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine.

(Yeah, I know – Ramius was the co-star, Jonesy, Ritter, yadda yadda.  I got that.  But in all of Clancy’s novels, technology was a co-star as well).

And the Dallas is being decommissioned:

Tom Clancy’s Cold War thriller made the Dallas famous, but in Navy circles it is better known for being the first attack submarine to carry a dry-deck shelter, which houses a vehicle for launching and recovering special operations forces.

“Dallas” earlier in her career

“Of all the submarines that would be finishing up their service life, there are a couple out there that people know by name, and Dallas is one of them,” said Capt. David A. Roberts, who commanded Dallas from 2007 to 2009. “It kind of adds to the moment. ‘The Hunt for Red October’ submarine we all know and love from the movies is going to be finishing up its service life soon.”

Via Dave Thul, an Army guy.

Rescued From Pre-Thanksgiving Doc Dump

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It’s only the SCSU Poll – a poll we’ve pretty well shredded in the past for its systematic bias toward the DFL.

But even that can’t varnish the fact that it’s a whole new campaign for the DFL in Minnesota.  Approval ratings of everyone but Amy Klobuchar are in the toilet.  How in the toilet?:

Minnesotans came down in the middle on Franken and Dayton, two Democrats who will stand for re-election next year. Franken got a 51-degree rating, while Dayton was at 49.

Respondents are feeling cooler toward Obama, rating him at 46 this year, down from 54 in SCSU’s 2012 survey.

And that’s just the warm-fuzzy poll.  When you get into job approval, it’s even dodgier for the DFL incumbents:

Reflecting national polls, the president’s job performance ratings also dropped from last year and returned to 2010 levels. This year, 38 percent of Minnesotans rated him positively, compared to 47 percent in 2012.

For Dayton, less than half the respondents (44 percent) gave him positive marks this year, while a slight majority (52 percent) rated him negatively.

Franken had a low approval score of 39 percent, while 57 percent approved of Klobuchar’s performance.

The media will, of course, do their best to rehabilitate the DFL, Dayton and Franken over the next 11 months.  But they’ve got their work cut out for them.

The Left Hand Doesn’t Know What The Farther-Left Hand Is Doing

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It was one of the stories that got no play last session, in spite of the fact because it highlights the bizarre schizophrenia of using politics to allocate human capital, but while on the one hand AFSCME was working to unionize home-child-care providers – who are independent contractors and don’t have “management” – it was instituting full-day kindergarten, reducing the number of kids who’d be in daycare at all.

Which wasn’t entirely incongruous, if you think about it; to the DFL, racket money from daycare providers and union dues from a doubling of Kindergarten teachers are both just revenue streams.

But this?

The final rule, for the most part, confirmed a proposed rule, issued in July, which will cut the Medicare home health benefit by $22 billion over the next four years.

“Congress asked [Center for Medicaid Services],” Halamandaris said, “to do a comprehensive evaluation of the home health benefit, to isolate what works and what needs improvement, how to increase access and efficiency, and how to reduce costs while improving the quality of care. CMS did none of this. Instead, all they did was look to impose the largest possible cut —3.5 percent a year — on the Medicare home health benefit. This adds up to 14 percent over the next four years, or a total of $22 billion.”

The National Association for Home Care & Hospice has produced studies showing that the Medicare home health benefit has already endured more than its fair share of cuts. The benefit has been cut a disproportionate $78 billion since 2009. Add in the newly imposed cut and $100 billion in cuts will have been taken from the most popular and most-needed Medicare program. And as a result of these cuts by the end of 2017, 75 percent of Medicare-certified agencies will be forced under water with profit margins of zero or less.

“The clear conclusion is that saving money is more important to CMS than serving those who are so sick they cannot leave home without assistance,” Halamandaris pointed out. “It is obvious that they turned a deaf ear to our pleas on behalf of aged, infirm, disabled, and dying Americans.”

In other words, while the SEIU was working calling in markers with the DFL to unionize home-care workers, President Obama was working to shut the industry down completely.

Good job, guys.

The Real Roots Of Gun Control

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One of “Protect” MN’s most insidious lies is that the Second Amendment and Gun Rights are affectations of white suburban males.

(I’m a honky, all right, but I do live in the city.  Your stereotype is null and void. But we knew that).

But the roots of gun control are, and have always been, utterly and corrosively racist.

This video – “No Guns for Negroes” – documents the racist roots of gun control.  It’s about twenty minutes, and it’s well worth the watch.

More than that?  It shows the effect that armed blacks had in deterring Klan violence.  The “Deacons of Defense” were an organized group of blacks, mostly veterans, who existed to deter Klan attacks against civil rights activities and black communities in the sixites.  The media – in the bag as most of them are for gun control – have pretty much buried that story.

From A Planet With Several Moons

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Heather Martins talking.  Lying.  Same thing.

“There is no history of someone like that being a meaningful deterrent or being able to stop an attack,” she said.  Seriously?

Someone should inform Abby Simons, the Star Tribune journalist who wrote the article, of some facts about permitted carry holders stopping crime, just for the variety of citing actual truth for a change.

It strikes me:  Rep. Paymar says the presence of armed citizens in the legislative chamber intimidates legislators.  Pistols carried openly are intimidating. Really?  All of them?  How about when cops testify while in uniform, openly carrying their firearms, is that intimidating?  If so, then you should disarm everybody in the hearing room, which you’re not going to do because there’d be nobody to provide protection.

If openly carried pistols don’t intimidate you on a policeman’s belt, why not?  Cops shoot far more innocent people every year than permitted carry holders.  Why are pistols carried openly on cops’ belts not intimidating?  Because you trust cops implicitly but not citizens?  Why is that . . . and what does it say about your attitude toward the people you’re supposed to be representing?

Joe Doakes

If intellectual honesty and logical consistency were gasoline, Heather Martens couldn’t drive around the inside of a Cheerio.