Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
to St. Paul, what will we sell to keep the lights on?
We don’t have Tiffany stained glass windows to sell out of our City Hall, as Duluth did.
Joe Doakes
Saint Paulians – feel free to sound off with ideas!
Me? I suggest selling off Saint Anthony Park. The whole neighborhood. Turn it into a theme park; “Limo Liberal La-La Land!”
Joe Doakes emails:
Plainly, we need to focus our gun control efforts on East Side teens cravingchicken wings. Neither one is old enough to possess a handgun. So how’d they pass the background check?
You need to be able to answer that question to make your pet legislation sensible. Otherwise, it’s just one more law in a long string of laws broken by these two, and others like them.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
The answer is this; um, if the law-abiding have to pass background checks, there’ll be no time to sell guns to teenagers? I think?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve discovered “IHeartRadio”‘s music stations feature; you enter an artist, set a lev of familiarity (so the system plays song by artists more or less closely stylistically related to your selected artist), and let the music roll.
And it’s cool. Seriously.
But every artist I entered – Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Marah, Richard Thompson, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Sam and Dave – all led, within half a dozen songs, to one Neil Young song or another.
Neil Young is the number 42 of pop music (in the Douglass Adams rather than Jackie Robinson senses of the word. Er, number).
Remember that one?:
Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.
The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago…The secret email accounts complicate an agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.
Yeah, I remember that “transparent government” crap too. That was back when The One was going to rehabilitate the US diplomatically in the eyes of the world, if I recall correctly.
What Jim Graves Says: “Even though his would-be rivalRep. Michele Bachmann has decided to forgo running for re-election, 6th District DFL candidate Jim Graves said he’s not looking to change his campaign’s message or strategy going forward.”
What I’ll Bet Dimes To Dollars Is Really Happening At Graves HQ: “Dammit! We spent big bucks for those doctored “crazy eyes” posters! Now what the f**k are we going to plaster all over Anoka?”
Details on the Minnesota Warriors, who’ll be having their Hall of Honor game on Monday.
I got an email from a friend of mine commenting on the Strib’s headline re the budget:
Minnesota legislators squeeze out a budget at the last moment”
Yes, they squeezed out a budget. Looking at the budget, I could not have given a better headline. What a stinker.
It needs to be flushed in 2014.
(SCENE: MITCH Berg and Avery LIBRELLE meet at the coffee shop).
MITCH (Walks into store): Hey, Avery.
LIBRELLE (leaving store holding a latte): What’s that? You want to kill me?
MITCH: Beg pardon?
LIBRELLE: You hate me for my stances on abortion and gun control and you want to shoot me with your assault weapon?
MITCH: Um, start over. What are you talking about?
LIBRELLE: Was that another threat?
MITCH: I’m just here for, er, coffee…
LIBRELLE: Help! Raaaaaaaape!
(And SCENE).
Fiction?
If only; a U of Wyoming liberal activist has been busted threatening herself with rape on Facebook.
Oh, she did it under a sock puppet “conservative” ID:
And the Laramie police weren’t fooled:
University of Wyoming student targeted by an anonymous Facebook posting that included a threat of sexual violence had posted the item herself, police said.
The university in Laramie, Wyoming announced on Tuesday that campus police cited Meg Lanker-Simons for misdemeanor interference with a police investigation by giving false statements
On the one hand, it’s an attempt to frame conservatives, especially gun rights supporters. And Lanker-Simons’ supporters are doubling down, naturally:
‘I will tell you, I believe Meg is innocent of this outrage,’ Kandt told the Laramie Boomerang, adding she believes the citation issued by police is a ‘classic case of blaming the victim.’
‘I mean, my God, who would do this to herself?’ she added.
(Ditto her husband, who answers the question “What ever happened to “RB” from those Arby’s ads?”)
It does, in fact, happen all the time; the Duke Lacrosse Team, the Tawanna Brawley incident, even (as I recall, but can’t find) a case at Saint Cloud State in the past decade or so.
On the other hand, it’s no worse than the stuff Michelle Malkin gets every day from real liberals with the tacit blessing of the Democrat establishment and media.
Russian mobster buys $100M in Apple stock.
In 2015, look for Apple to release “iBurner”, the first intentionally-disposable iPhone.
It’s a Doakes twofer today:
The Left was aching for the Boston Bombers to be White Males so they could lecture us that whole thing was Our Fault; but Chechnyan Muslims don’t quite fit the bill for that. Can’t blame Islamic terror, that was supposed to have ended when Barak The Slayer single-handedly killed Wicked Osama Bin Laden and then respectfully threw his body into the ocean, in accordance with newly discovered traditions of that desert religion.
But wait – the two boys didn’t act without reason. They were forced to blow up the Boston Marathon, they had no other way exercise their First Amendment Right to protest The War in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They’re not terrorists, they’re Code Pinkers!
And who started the war in Iraq, with his yellow cake lie, cowboy ways and headlong rush to war?
OMG, the Boston Marathon bombing really IS Bush’s fault!
Like Anthropogenic Global Warming – it’s a thesis that can never be found false, since all evidence that proves it false is teased into proving it.
The best legislation happens when sarcasm turns into policy:
When Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, introduced an amendment that would require drug tests for Minnesota welfare recipients, Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, countered with an amendment to the amendment. If welfare recipients had to pee in a cup before they could get a check from the state, she said, state lawmakers should have to do the same.
“You should be ashamed. You should really be ashamed to be using poor kids” to score political points, Liebling told Drazkowski during floor debate.
Blanket drug tests for lawmakers, she said, makes about as much sense as blanket testing of participants in the Minnesota Family Investment Program, or MFIP.
To which every single Minnesotan responds “Hell yeah!” And those of us who work in the private sector added “if we have to take the whiz test before job offers become official, then yes, let’s make sure both welfare recipients and the legislature, and maybe every single government employee, does the same”.
To their credit, so did the House:
Liebling’s amendment might have been ironic, but it won enthusiastic support from both sides of the aisle. Liebling’s amendment to the amendment was adopted with the support of all but a dozen lawmakers, including House Speaker Paul Thissen. Drazkowski’s amendment passed by a vote of 83-49.
I’m sure the amendment will get scrubbed out over time. But for the moment, it makes epic sense.
When Second Amendment human rights activists saw the movie Groundhog Day, we had two reactions:
Repeating the same day over and over and over and over and over and over again – it’s sort of what we Second Amendment activists do. Only the cycle, at least in terms of the media’s approach to the issue, runs about every five years or so.
Because there are no new questions on this issue. Since the 1960s, it’s been the same tiny set of points, accusations, strawmen, red herrings and the odd honest question, over and over and over again.
I’ve been active in the Second Amendment human rights movement since the eighties. I’ve been through a series of cycles in media and astroturf interest in the subject; the wave of post-office mass murders in the eighties (whose main vestige today is the phrase “going postal”), the Florida “shall issue” bill, the Stockton schoolyard massacre, the Luby’s massacre and a few copycat episodes, the Shall Issue debate in Minnesota, Columbine and the small wave of copycat school shootings (including the Red Lake massacre in Minnesota), Virginia Tech, and finally the three big shootings of this past year and a half, the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings (but never, it seems over Washington DC or Chicago).
Each of the episodes had a different story. But each of them brought out basically the same set of questions, largely from media people who thought they were the first to ask the questions. They start with the simple, situational questions – “why does anyone need a thirty round magazine?” – and graduate to The Big Questions, “what does the Second Amendment really mean, and do we need it at all?”.
Every. Single. Time.
Anyway – Eric Black at the MinnPost spun the wheel this past week, writing a three part iteration of a whole long slew of the same questions about the Second Amendment that, depending on how long you’ve been a Second Amendment human rights activist, you might have lost count of the times you’ve answered.
But the goal, always, for the Second Amendment human rights supporter, isn’t to do the end-zone happy dance over past triumphs. It’s about convincing and persuading successive generations of people about the rightness of the cause.
And so as this week progresses I’ll be addressing the points in Black’s series.
Stay tuned through the week.
…that if we gave carry permits to civilians, and allowed people outside law enforcement to carry firearms, there’d be people pointing guns at each other over trivial things.
As far as Governor Messinger Dayton’s mystery Fortune-500 Biotech company coming to Minnesota, I can’t say much that Andy Aplikowski didn’t say better in his excellent piece on the topic (which <a “href=http://residualforces.com/2013/04/17/dfl-secretly-proving-republicans-are-better-for-business-and-jobs/”>you should go read now.
Except this: if your taxes are at a point where government provides a reasonable value for business, you don’t need to give big Tax Increment Finance breaks (AKA “Picking Winners”) to attract business and jobs.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
Here’s the photo and the caption from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 6, 2013.
Rob Doar with the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance holds up a Ruger 10/22 Assault Rifle as a visual aid on day two of hearings on proposed new gun laws the House Public Safety Committee in the State Office Building in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday, February 5, 2013. He was arguing that the proposed law would make certain versions of gun illegal depending on what he called ‘cosmetic changes’. (Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)
Read that again: “Ruger 10/22 Assault Rifle.” You realize it shoots ordinary .22’s, right? Yes, it has all the bells and whistles to look like a heavy-duty killing machine, but it’s still just a .22. And it’s semi-auto, meaning one-shot-per-trigger-pull. A true “assault rifle” is a machine gun: hold the trigger and it shoots until empty. This isn’t one of them. This is a baby wannabe. It’s good for shooting at tin cans but not much else.
It’s like the Asian guys who put mag wheels, spoilers and loud mufflers on their Honda Civics. Looks cool, yes; but it’s never going to win NASCAR. That tricked-out Honda is not a muscle car and this tricked-out .22 is not an assault rifle.
The fact the reporter believes this plinker needs to be as heavily regulated as the M-16’s that Marines carry in Afghanistan tells you all you need to know about the Media. The fact Democrats on the committee agree with him, that’s the really scary part.
They keep telling us there is no Liberal Bias in the Legacy Media. Ignorance, maybe. Stupidity, possibly. But definitely not Liberal Bias. It’s stuff like this keeps me from believing them.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Joe is right, of course.
The hard part is turning low-information news consumers into informed voters. It’s also the mandatory part.
It’s not quite like Then-Senator Messinger Dayton closing his Senate office back in 2005 and fleeing to Minnesota, leaving his staff and the rest of Congress to toil away under threat of terrorist attack.
But one wonders now a Minnesota native like Al Franken can show his face in public after his performance yesterday.
Minnesota’s junior Senator closed his office yesterday in the face of one of this season’s array of “Snowmageddons”.
Lights out!
And from what was Senator Franken protecting his staff?
This bit of wet, icy hell outside:
Politico reporter Byron Tau had photo of the sloppy carnage elsewhere in the District:
Somehow, I doubt Norm Coleman would have closed his office for this.
Bob Woodward has spent the past four decades as a hero of the Left…
…until this past week, when he transgressed against The One.
Now? He’ll never do lunch in DC again:
Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about – and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half hour,” Woodward told us in an hour-long interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.
Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”
Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’ ”
Oh, he’s got plenty more to go around.
A St. Paul Libertarian GOP activist sent this photo of a bus disgorging a load of…
…eight people in SEIU caps to protest in front of Wells Fargo.
To Mark Ritchie, I suppose that’s a mandate.
When you try to debate the Second Amendment with a “reasonable”, “moderate” gun control advocate, they frequently take great pains to reassure the audience “we’re not coming after the rights of the law-abiding citizen!”.
And maybe some of them, the (mini-van full of) rank and file of the Minnesota gun grabber movement, believe it.
But their leaders? Not so much.
Joan Peterson is the doyenne of “Protect MN”; think “Mussolini” to Rep. Heather Martens’ Count Ciano.
And her manifesto is…well, manifest, if you just bother to read it.
Mark Okern of the Minnesota Gun Owners PAC did. Read the whole thing.
And remember it during the next session, when the gun grabbers try to play “reasonable”. Joan Peterson is the real thing; the movement’s inner id, the one with no compunctions about saying what she’s really after (since in her life she’s apparently never needed compunctions of any kind).
Read it. Circulate it among your friends, especially shooters that might go squishy.
. https://mobile.twitter.com/Vision365/status/279825506365472768
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
The statement (about 2:00 minutes in)
The predictable response.
My thought:
One basic rule of economics is: if you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Liberals approve of targeted tax breaks for things they like: electric cars and solar panels. Liberals approve of government subsidies for things they like: sports stadia and college classes. Liberals support these public expenditures because they know that without public subsidies, people wouldn’t pay for the Volt or the Vikings. As a result, the companies that produce products nobody wants to buy voluntarily (General Motors or Solyndra) become dependent on government money and can’t survive without it.
Clearly, some expenditures of government money influence private behavior and create dependency.
Welfare gives out government money, but only to those who follow its rules. Does welfare influence people to change their private behavior to qualify? Some do, certainly. Do continued welfare payments influence people to continue to behave in ways that qualify – passing up jobs or sending the other parent out of the home? Again, some do, without doubt.
Do long-term continued welfare payments influence people to become dependent on welfare? There are plenty of social scientists who’d agree.
If welfare payments follow the same economic principles of behavior influence as any other subsidy, and if Democrats know this but insist on funding welfare anyway; then it’s fair to say Democrats support programs which foster dependency on government, that keep people trapped in narrow behavioral ruts, discourage freedom, initiative, self-sufficiency and independence.
Now, to point out this truth, are politicians required to speak in short, literal prose sentences? Are metaphor and simile prohibited in public discourse? Was Martin Luther King, Jr. really sleeping when he had his dream? Did Bobby Kennedy really ask why things never were – is there a tape of it?
If a politician were to say that Democrats treat welfare recipients as if they were pets to be fed and sheltered but never allowed to run free, is that really an act of vicious hate speech equating poor people with animals? Have we all forgotten the difference between literal speech and illustrative speech?
If I speak the Truth in vivid imagery, what’s the objection: that I used the imagery . . . or that I spoke the Truth?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Only the right – that is, left – people are only supposed to tell the truth, and then only “the truth” that’s been approved by their various superiors.
Do I have to keep explaining this?
When your friend deserts you, it’s bad.
When your self-proclaimed founder jams you under the bus like she’s wedging one last trash bag into the dumpster?
U.S. Senate hopeful and Harvard Law prof Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed she laid the “intellectual foundation” for the Occupy Wall Street movement, is jilting the anti-corporate proteges in her own Ivy League yard, refusing to sign a petition in support of Occupy Harvard.
Warren, who declined to speak to the Herald, is focused on her campaign, said spokesman Kyle Sullivan.
“Elizabeth hasn’t signed the petition, but she’s been standing up to Wall Street and the big banks [bla bla bla – Ed.],” said Sullivan in a statement.
I think it’s time for conservatives to step up and help “Occupy” to survive.
They’re going to be an electoral bonanza for us next year, at this rate.
Occopy New York protestors terrorize school children:
In the middle of thousands of protestors yelling and chanting — some kicking and screaming – CBS 2’s Emily Smith found little school kids trying to get to class. Nervous parents led them through the barriers on Wall Street. The NYPD helped funnel the children, anything to ease their fears while some protestors chanted “follow those kids!”
Maybe it’s time for real people to start occupying the occupation.
DirectorBlue compares the Tea Party and “Occupy” movements:
I’ve been hearing it for over a month; “The “Occupy” Movement is going to be bigger than the Tea Party!”, and “It’s gaining1 It’s really really gaining!”.
I’ve been telling people who say that “get back to me when you’ve flipped Congress”.
But as Glenn Reynolds notes in the WashEx, we don’t have to wait for the next Congressional and Presidential elections to see what movement actually packs the electoral gear:
Though they’ve mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally — the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures — the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.
But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation’s mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.
In the first significant tax-policy vote since the media began fawning over “Occupy”, the hippies have come up short:
In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado’s farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)
As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, “The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority — something on the order of two-thirds — of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections.”
Red state inertia?
Hardly:
This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008.
As John Lennon might have said on The White Album’s classic “Revolution”, “If you’re gonna go hanging out in tents/you own’t affect elections now or hence…”
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