A “Shoprite” store in Philadelphia is closing due to Philadelphia’s pop tax. 

Or so says the owners – someone with years of experience in the field, for what that’s worth:

Store owner Jeff Brown says this location has lost approximately 25 percent of its business over the last two years because of the tax on soda and sweetened drinks. 

The city, not to be “Mansplained”…er, “Bossplained?” “Enterepreneursplained?” Anyway, not to be taken to task by a mere prole, the city responded:

The mayor’s office responded with a lengthy statement pushing back against Brown.
“It is no surprise that Mr. Brown has decided to scapegoat the Philadelphia Beverage Tax, but neither he nor the beverage industry have yet to present any evidence that the tax has had any impact on sales. Here’s evidence to the contrary: an ongoing study by three of the most reputable academic institutions in the nation (Harvard University, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania) finds the beverage tax has not affected overall store sales, contrary to other public claims by this supermarket chain.”
Brown says the 111 employees will be transferred to his 12 other supermarkets.

Anyone but me suspect hat Mr. Brown’s going to get an audit letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue sometime soon here?

Up next: a Harvard Study on how taxes have nothing to do with “Food Deserts”, no way, no how.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The New Hotness wants higher income tax rates.  The Left says it’s sensible and there’s historical precedent.
The trouble with historical precedent is picking the right precedent.  College students who drink until they vomit could point to Rome, the pinnacle of civilization at the time, where vomitoria were provided in public entertainment venues.  So that makes it alright?   No.
Similarly, picking a time when America was the world economic superpower and capital investment had nowhere else to go, doesn’t mean that high earners today would find their wages captured by higher tax rates.  Rich people are rich, they’re not stupid.  They can move to low-tax venues.  They can shelter their incomes.  They can lobby for loopholes that only they can afford. 
The only way to ensure that everybody pays their “fair share” is to fully embrace Communism:  from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  But getting ordinary people into that mental state will require a period of socialization, during which the recalcitrant, deplorable, bitter clingers are identified and sent for re-education in the far North, or sent to farm the land by hand, or buried in mass graves.  And who will decide who lives and who dies? 

But the fact that it used to be the status quo back when the US was the world’s only functional economy (with ample tax shelters provided for the fabulously wealthy, like Ocasio Cortez’s benefactors) makes it “moderate”, to Big Left.

Elizabeth Warren forms a 2020 Exploratory.

I give her a 1/1024 chance of winning.

Here’s the vehicle in which she plans to travel between her series of town hall meetings

Oh, I’m just getting started.

Joe Doakes from Como Park sent this to me back around Christmas Eve – and I spent most of that intervening week either on the road or on my back with the flu. But while holidays come and go, the economy is always timely:

You can judge the state of the economy by how many businesses are open Christmas Eve.
In bad times, you can’t miss a single customer.  You’re open for business, even if it’s only the owner and his wife staffing the store.
In good times, you can afford to take a day off and even pay your employees for no work.  The store closes early, if it opens at all.
How’s the economy in your neighborhood? 

Can’t speak for Christmas Eve – I was in North Dakota, where the rules are a little different – but I did notice I couldn’t find a place to grab a bite to eat anywhere on New Years Day.

Maybe there’s something to that…

Dems and MSM (pardon the redundancy) alarmed that Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t seem to have changed the GOP’s support among Hispanics:

VoteCast data from the Associated Press showed that 32 percent of Latinos voted for Republicans at a time when many pundits and most Democrats hoped that the demographic group might lead an electoral revolt against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“Data from November’s elections show the GOP’s position among Latinos has not weakened during the Trump administration, despite the president’s rhetoric and policy,” read the tweet from MSNBC.

Of course, the media has spent a decade ignoring the fact that Hispanics poll even more hawkish on border security than anglos do; the GOP loses them on mass deportation. Even the most conservative Latinos frequenlty have someone in the family who came here illegally.

Some Venezuelans are realizing something that we Real Americans have been tryihg to explain to Califorians, New Yorkers, New Jersey-ites and Connecti…cutters (?); that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with hunting, and is only coincidentally about self-defense against criminals.

They’re figuring it out…

“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”

Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all – except government entities.

Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntary gun surrenders, while the majority of seizures – more than 12,500 – were by force.

…just a tad too late.

Liberals scoff when Real Americans talk about guns being a bulwark against tyranny.

Perhaps because they’re OK with tyranny.

Politifact long ago gave up any claim to being non-partisan, at least among people who pay attention.   Fact-checking Politi”fact” is itself a target-rich environment for fact-checkers and “progressive” dogma-untanglers.

This year, they were kind of sly about it – the “winner” was “the “online smear machine” that attempted to “take down Parkland students.”

They’re referring mostly to Alex Jones’ reprehensible claims that the Parkland massacre was a setup and that the kids are “crisis actors”, and the small but vocal social media crowd that echoed the claim.

Of course, this brings up a logical problem, and a condundrum

First the logical problem, as David Harsanyi points out in Federalist:  –

Although I know of numerous Twitter accounts that have accused gun-rights advocates of being “terrorists,” many of them featuring blue checkmarks, I can’t recall a single conservative in Congress, anyone in the National Rifle Association, or any other mainstream right-wing group accusing the Parkland kids of being “crisis actors.” I do recall a single article on RedState questioning David Hogg’s actions the day of the mass shooting, which was quickly corrected and apologized for.

Yet PolitiFact spends much of its time detailing the Parkland kids’ cause by highlighting their political opponents who have nothing to do with the smear, implicitly linking them to the “Lie of the Year.” The piece is framed in a way that intimates that anyone contesting the Parkland kids’ political cause is now in league with the online mob – and Russian bots!

By the way, even if we allow that kids who experience this tragedy should dictate the contours of a policy debate, it is worth noting that there are “Parkland kids” who hold diverging opinions regarding the Second Amendment and arming teachers. They are largely ignored by the media.

It’s not the kids’ fault that they find themselves the focus of ugliness on social media. It’s the fault of those who attack them and the adults who exploit them for political causes. Young people should be given some leeway in their activism, even if they say ridiculous things—and David Hogg and other leaders of the March for Our Lives movement often say things that aren’t even in the proximity of the truth. There is no need for ad hominemattacks. But the “Parkland kids” were also given a massive stage on which to offer their uncontested emotionalism to drive the debate. Kids or not, Americans have every right to challenge their contentions.

And Politifact using Jones as the figurehead of this criticism is a strawman that tries to paint all criticism of Hogg and company as the same breed of crazy.   And yet Hogg and the rest of the kids that’ve been propped up with liberal plutocrat money deserve criticism; they are little petty tyrants in the making, and they are serial liars to boot.

Now the conundrum; without Politifact to tell people who Alex Jones was and what he was claiming, would anyone outside the alt-“right” fever swamp have ever heard of him?

The “online smear machine” is an amorphous and ugly entity that isn’t confined to any ideology and spares virtually no one in the public eye. But any way you look at it, imbuing it with an importance it doesn’t deserve isn’t doing public discourse any favors. Even if it makes conservatives look bad.

And finally – given that almost nobody in this country hears about Alex Jones except when the media expresses its high dudgeon over him, are his antics really “the biggest lie” of the year?  Or even the biggest lie about the Parkland massacre?

It’s debatable, in fact, that it was even the most significant lie disseminated about the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High. The sheriff of Broward County, after all, was featured at the widely covered CNN anti-gun rally where he misled the nation about the failures, cowardice, and incompetence that allowed the shooting to occur. And the sheriff of Broward County isn’t some random Twitter troll.

Yet.

Further evidence that the mainstream media needs to be distrusted but verified – and then, especially on hot-button topics like this, almost invariably distrusted some more.

The panel of law-enforcement and educators responsible for recommendations in the wake of the Parkland school massacre have…

…committed an act of common sense for which heads will roll.  

They advocate allowing staff, with proper training, to be armed at school.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission voted 13-1 to recommend the Legislature allow the arming of teachers, saying it’s not enough to have one or two police officers or armed guards on campus.
Florida law adopted after the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 dead allows districts to arm non-teaching staff members such as principals, librarians and custodians — 13 of the 67 districts do, mostly in rural parts of the state.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, the commission’s chairman, pushed the measure at the Tallahassee meeting. He said most deaths in school shootings happen within the first few minutes, before officers on and off campus can respond.
He said suspect Nikolas Cruz stopped to reload his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle five times, all of which would have been opportunities for an armed teacher to shoot him.
“We have to give people a fighting chance, we have to give them an opportunity to protect themselves,” Gualtieri said. He said there aren’t enough officers or money to hire one for every school, but even then officers need backup. “One good guy with a gun on campus is not enough.”

I can hear Big Left – who, let’s not mince words, benefit from dead students – howling already.  

In fact, so can you. 

The only acceptable solution – saddle the law-abiding with laws that at best do nothing, and at worst make citizens and their children helpless victims mass shooters, street criminals, and other such Democrat constituents. 

If I’ve noticed anything about radical progressives, it’s that they tend to be intensely angry – and desperately unhappy.

Why?

Here’s the story, from someone who’s been there.

Excerpt from the conclusion

Young adults often become radicals after they realize the immensity of the cruelty and malevolence in the world. They reject a society that tolerates such suffering. They sanctify justice as their telos. But without truth to orient justice, seekers of justice will crash and crash again into reality, and will craft increasingly nightmarish and paranoid ideological analyses, burning out activists, destroying lives through jail or abuse, and leaving the world an uglier, more painful place. To paraphrase Alice Dreger, there is no justice without wisdom, and no wisdom without surrender to uncertainty in the pursuit of truth.

The whole thing’s worth a read.

Think about it when looking at the new DFL majority in Saint Paul.

From a regular commenter – firearm licenses in Germany are up 130% in the past four years:

According to [a German news service] feelings of insecurity are an important factor for the increase of the licences. Since the start of the migrant crisis in 2015, Germany has seen several terror attacks on festivals, trains and a Christmas market.

“We must be careful not to get American conditions in Germany,” the deputy chairman of police union (GdP) said. “There is a danger that weapons will not be used properly and that their owners will endanger themselves.”

Given German history, Germans should be more nervous about getting German conditions in Germany.  

Comedian Kevin Hart was dropped from hosting the Oscars over a bunch of “homophobic” tweets from long, long ago.

Given the record of many Oscar hosts in recent years, it may have been the best thing to happen to him – but I digress.

Comic Nick Cannon – famously un-PC comic that he is – came to his fellow comic’s defense against, pointing out similar similar/worse transactions by three of the whitest women in the business:

A sample:

And I fucking love Wreck it Ralph!!! 🤦🏾‍♂️ https://t.co/6cHA1EQEkg

— Nick Cannon (@NickCannon) December 8, 2018

So as the left has shown us in the past year, an “entertainer” or politician can get away with groping women, verbally and physically abusing them, and the sort of homophobia and sexism that gets ushered firmly away from the mic at any GOP event – provided they bring the power or the visibility Big Left needs.

The world has fairly erupted with tribute (and a little abuse) for President George HW Bush, who passed away over the weekend after 94 exceedingly eventful years and maybe six months without his wife of seven decades, Barbara.

I have little to add, myself.   His presidency coincided with a time where I honestly wasn’t paying much attention to the world around me, and probably even less to what was going on with me.

He had, of course, an impossible job – following The Gipper.  He made his mistakes – “Read My Lips!  No New Taxes!” – but ran a fairly capable administration that managed to complete Reagan’s work of dismantling the Berlin Wall,

I got one in my inbox over the weekend that caught my attention.  Sam Moore – of “Sam and Dave” fame.   Moore played Bush’s inauguration party back in 1989:

My wife Joyce and I are personally saddened by the passing of one of the most honorable decent men our country ever had serve as its President.

I had the honor of performing at his 1989 Inaugural concert Joyce co-produced ‘The Celebration for Young Americans’, his and Barbara’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration, where The Oak Ridge Boys helped celebrate them, The Points of Light Kennedy Center Concert & Fundraiser and last year’s One America Appeal hurricane relief concert at Texas A & M in College Station.

Our strength and comfort goes out to the entire Bush family who we’ve been fortunate to know, see and feel their collective love and admiration for Papa Bush who has now gone to join the love of his life, Barbara.

Rest in heaven President Bush with Mama and that beautiful little girl you two lost but never forgot, Robin. God speed sir.

As a related note – Bush’s inaugural concert was an amazing event:

Will the social justice police finish eating each other…

“The Vagina Monologues,” once a cutting-edge cry of feminist liberation, is headed to the campus forbidden zone . . . because it excludes women who don’t have vaginas.

Seriously: The Women’s Resource Center at Eastern Michigan University just stopped productions of Eve Ensler’s 1994 play for its lack of trans-sensitivity, as well as its supposed overall lack of diversity and inclusion.

…before they take the rest of society down with them?

The primary assumption of radical identity feminism is that womankind just doesn’t need men.

The revolution in, for lack of a better term, “sex robots”, might promise to flip that assumption on its head; men might just as well do without women:

The average single man paying attention to contemporary social fashions will struggle to understand the new rules of meeting, courting, or having sex with women. Something as banal as trying to converse with a woman wearing headphones is now often considered harassment. A man’s chances of mating success increase when he approaches many women, but so too do his chances of a gaining reputation as sexist, exploitative, or immoral. To take a fraught example, how does a man know that a woman is genuinely consenting to sex? A lack of ability to pick up on cues can incur catastrophic costs.

Men high in conscientiousness, who are sensitive to social disapproval but who nonetheless have difficulty reading subtle social cues, could make good husbands for women. These men are unlikely to want to take the risk of approaching women. As substitutes like sex robots and virtual companions become better and cheaper, they will monopolize the attention of such men.

Think of an introverted engineer with Asperger’s syndrome who wasn’t sure how to broach a conversation with a woman back in 2015 and definitely isn’t sure how to do that in today’s climate. In 10 years he could have a beautiful robot companion (indeed, he could have one that could emulate the experience of having sex with dozens of different women) that has a lower barrier to entry than the mating market and that keeps him satisfied enough to remain a happy bachelor. Some woman misses out on a conscientious guy with a good income who might not know exactly how to respond when she says “nothing’s wrong,” but will definitely keep the cars tuned up to get the kids to their mathematics championships. The world might miss out on his sons and daughters and their analytical approaches to some of the world’s problems.

I’m always going to prefer the real thing, speaking for myself – but the fact that this spectre makes all the right people feel panicky…:

Jon Stewart – the former TV host, not the former Twin Cities blogger – has a few words for the media – and they’re mighty close to the words I have for them, as luck would have it.

Stewart calls them narcissists.  I’ll stick with “whiners”:

Amanpour pushed back against Stewart’s suggestion, saying journalists react to Trump’s attacks this way because it’s “hard for us to be dispassionate when words from the White House are aggressive against us.”

“You’re not used to it,” Stewart replied, saying journalists should keep in mind the other struggling communities in U.S. before making the fight all about themselves.

“Think of the communities of color, think of Muslims, think of the black community. When journalists rise to this outrage of ‘How dare you say that about us,’ think of the lives that they’ve been leading under this and what they’ve been put under,” he said.

The problem with the media in recent years is their mission has morphed to “Afflicting those who are comfortable afflicting the media, and comforting those who comfort the media’s afflictors”.

I could write six thousand words about Berg’s Seventh, Sixteenth and Seventeenth laws if I wanted.

Or I could just display this:

Either way.  Mission accomplished.

It’s rapidly becoming a Berg’s Law – liberals are usually good for one round of “debate”, until the one round of chanting points they “know” about the subject (they don’t actually know them; they’re regurgitating) get struck down.  Then they switch to ad hominem, ad hominem, ofay mockery, and worse.  .

It’s true on most subject – guns, sexual harassment, gay  marriage, whatever – but healthcare is far from an exception.

And in the chanting points that make up their world, “Single Payer Healthcare” is an immaculate, unimpeachable concept.    None have ever been shown the drastic falloff in outcomes (as opposed to coverage – which is the easy part.

Enter Forbes:

Consider one nurse’s letter explaining why she quit the profession. She described horrific working conditions. Medical professionals worked 12-hour shifts with little time for necessities like bathroom breaks or food. Managers felt they couldn’t do anything to change unsafe conditions created by overcrowded hospitals. “You cannot safely practice under such conditions,” she wrote. “Mistakes will be made and people will be harmed, some fatally.”

The shortage of providers has resulted in longer wait times for patients. In May, 4.3 million people in the United Kingdom were on waiting lists for surgery, a 10-year high. Adjusting for population, that would be like having everyone in the state of Florida on waiting lists. Roughly 3,500 British patients have been on hospital waiting lists for more than a year.

More than one in five British cancer patients waits longer than two months to begin treatment after receiving a referral from a general practitioner. In Scotland, fewer than 80 percent of patients receive needed diagnostic tests — endoscopies, MRIs, CT, scans and the like — within three months.

These delays are deadly. An analysis that covered just half of England’s hospitals found that almost 30,000 patients died in the past year while waiting for treatment — an increase of 57 percent compared to 2013.

Looking at how patients actually do  on NHS should be enough to cure any reasonable, informed, logical person of their infatuation…

…but I guess I just summed up the problem, didnt I?

A good dad with a gun ends a potential mass shooting at a McDonald’s:

The unidentified father was leaving the restaurant around 10:45 p.m. on Sunday when the suspect walked into the Birmingham, Alabama fast-food restaurant and started shooting.

The father then opened fire on the gunman, fatally wounding him. The dad and one of his children were also struck and suffered non-life threatening injuries.

Authorities do not know if the gunman was intending to rob the store or targeting a particular person. The father will not be facing charges, WBRC reports.

The motive – robbery, or a gang execution – isn’t clear at the moment to investigators…

And, thanks to one good guy with a gun, it doesn’t have to be.

Some Jews are learning the right, prudent lesson from the PIttsburgh Pogrom.

Indianapolis talk radio host Tony Katz describes his epiphany:

What happened in Pittsburgh is my nightmare scenario. For a few years now, on my radio shows in Indianapolis, I have said as loud and as clear as I can that any Jew who attends religious services without a firearm is risking their life and the lives of the ones they love.

But, in truth, I’ve never said it so kindly. I’ve said that nothing in America is more of a soft target than a synagogue on a Friday night or a Saturday morning. I discuss all houses of worship; synagogues, churches, mosques – they are all soft targets. I have argued that laws that prevent carrying a firearm in a house of worship where there is also a school are wrong, and should be changed (and, if necessary, ignored.)

The purpose of being trained and carrying a firearm is to protect yourself AND the ones your love. That means children: your children. Why would you ever put yourself in a position not to protect them? Why, as a society, would we ask this of any parent or guardian?

Read the whole thing.

The logical disconnect among the anti-gun crowd in view of episodes like the massacre in Pittsburgh – “helplessness is strength” – is frankly bizarre.

But only the convenient ones.

I’m gonna take a wild guess that if you asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how precisely it was that the US defeated Naziism, “turbocharging the industrial base and floating the whole thing on a sea of oil and a mountain of coal, to back up a complete national militarization” isn’t what she’s thinking.

I think she’s thinking it was all about Rosie the Riveter.

Here’s the link Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center  – the place to go to cut through the BS the left spews on 2nd Amendment issues.

And don’t forget to find out more about the two Osseo School Board candidates we talked with:

• Jessica Craig, incumbent (and a great one!), and
• Tania Simons, challenger to join Jessica.

Please volunteer or donate.  The local races is where the most important battles are being fought – in the case of school boards, it’s the battle for the next generation’s minds.

Via Heather Wilhelm at National Review – some wag with a printing budget is disttributing stickers about Austin that tell Texans what New Hampshireites, Vermontians, Coloradans, and residents of Edina, Minnetonka, Woodbury, Bloomington and Eagan coul dhave used while there was still time:  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/beto-orourke-media-coverage-embarrassing-spectacle/

One hero in Austin has taken to posting stickers around town featuring an image of a giant locust, paired with the following text: “I MIGRATED TO A THRIVING TEXAS FROM A LEFTIST [NIGHTMARE] AND NOW I’M VOTING FOR BETO FOR SENATE.”

Change the places and the names, it’s still the same idea.

My corollary – “You snork at people for “not voting for their best interests”, apparently assuming that “our best interests” are high crime, corruption, economic decay (except for the top 5%), skyrocketing housing prices. collapsing schools and a society that falls apart under the weight of exaggerated social division.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG, driving down Larpenteur Avenue, is behind a Subaru.  The Subaru, coated in liberal campaign stickers dating back to when the car was new (Wellstone’s first re-election campaign), suddenly blows a tire.  It tries to drive for a block or two on the flapping flat until it pulls over

BERG pulls over behind it and gets out to offer help…

…and is visibly dismayed to see Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, and office manager at a small phrenology practice, clamber out of the malfunctioning door.

SCAT:  Merg!  There is going to be an epidemic of white right-wing male violence!

BERG: Yeah, Big Left has been warning us about that for a long, long time.  In the meantime, while we wait, and wait, and wait for that to happen, all the actual violence is coming from the left. James Hodgkinson, the murder of Brooks Jennings, Floyd Corkins and his attack on the Family Research Council, the various “Anti”-Fa thugs and their attacks, the assaults on Sarah Anderson and Shane Mekeland, and a long, long list of other attacks.

SCAT: Yeah, but you’ve got people on the right calling for violenbce!

BERG: Such as?

SCAT:  Ted Nugent!

BERG:  A man whose commercial peak was 40 years ago, whose peak infliuence as a pundit was 25 years ago, and who was cashiered from the leadership of the NRA for being a loose cannon.

SCAT:   You conveniently omit Lester Crrunkins!

BERG:   Who in the flaming hootie-hoo is Lester Crunkins?

SCAT:  He’s a prominent Republican Party official who called for the violent establishmebt of a white homeland!

BERG: And where’s he from?

SCAT:  Prominent!

BERG:   Where?

SCAT:   Er…

BERG:   He’s from a town in western Oklahoma, he was the only person who showed up at the convention so he elected himself chair, and he’s been castigated by his county and state parties.   And that’s only after they found out who he was in the first place, since the only reason anyone knows who he was was the media flocking to report on a “prominent” Republican calling for violence.

Which is intended to draw attention away from the likes of Maxine Waters and the other Democrats calling for violence – which is what I call “Berg’s Seventh Law”, by the way.

SCAT:  (Winds up to try to punch BERG.  Swings.  BERG dodges the punch easily and steps back).  :

SCAT:  (Winded) .   That was self-defense!

BERG:  Of course it was…

(And SCENE)

Senator Warren just held a press conference saying that genetics tests prove that she is of between 1/64 and 1/512 Native American ancestry – and therefore “Native American”

Those same tests say that I – one of the most northern European people I know, and proud of it – am between 1/64 and 1/256 African-American.

If I were to use my “African-American heritage” to get preferential treatment, including prestigious academic appointments, based on a genetic sample like that, not only would people mock and taunt me, I would mock and taunt myself. And I would deserve it.

Please, my Democrat friends – nominate this woman for president in 2020.