Hunter Biden is being sued in Arkansas for paternity and child support. 
I don’t know anything about Arkansas child support law, but if this were a Minnesota case, our law requires the court to set child support based on income. Where income has changed downward, the court can rule that the obligor is intentionally self-limiting his income to avoid paying child support. In that case, the court can set child support based on imputed income.
Suppose you are Hunter Biden’s lawyer. He formerly made $80,000 per month for sitting on the board of a corporation. He no longer has that job. Do you concede that the board job was a legitimate job so his earning ability is $80,000 per month and set child support based on that? When he fails to pay, they’ll find him in contempt and throw him in jail. 
Or do you assert that the corporate job was phony, he was just a bagman for his dad to collect bribes from foreigners and now that his dad is out of office, the kid has no ability to earn the same level of bribe money so child support must be set lower?
You might get the kid out of paying child support, but what does it say about his dad, the candidate, and about President Trump’s phone call for which he just got impeached?
Answer, you quit. Hunter Biden’s lawyers just resigned from the case. I bet I know why.
Joe doakes

You can lie to the public, to a FISA court, or to a Democrat-controlled House with great, consequence-free effect.

But a family court? Where county money is at stake? Good luck with that.

To jog the memory – Berg’s Seventh Law reads “When a Liberal / “Progressive” issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

So – if the Democrats accuse any Republican, especially Trump, of some sort of miscreancy?

You can count on it being a noise-screen to cover up their own perfidy.

And it never really fails:

Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign.
In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan Halper was tasked with collecting intelligence on the Trump campaign, the Times story details how a woman was sent overseas under a fake name and occupation to oversee the spy operation. The woman’s real name is not mentioned in the article, though the Times says she went by “Azra Turk” and has a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.

This is going to go on a looong time.

Unless the Democrats sweep the White House and Congress in 2020, in which case it’s going to disappear…

Because maybe fewer people will pay attention to their miserable field of candidates, that’s why. 

I noted the other day that “progressives” seem to have only read-only memory; once they get a point in their heads, regardless of veracity or logic, it just stays there.

It has literally gotten to the point where the politicians and pundits of Big Left don’t even bother trying to convince people with any basis in fact or critical thinking skills; their entire message is repeating Big Lies often and loudly enough to convince the invincibly ignorant and browbeat the underinformed and insecure.

The mission today: add to the list. What are the lies, one line at a time, that Big Left gets the ignorant and the authoritarian to believe?

I’ll start below – but leave more in the comments.

• “Trump’s election was illegitimate!”
• “We’ve got more ‘gun violence’ now than ever before!”
• “The ‘Republican War on Women’”
• There are 57 genders
• America is a racist nation
• America is an antisemitic nation
• America’s past is a uniquely terrible thing
• Trump supported neo-Nazis at Charlottesville
• Socialism lifts people from poverty; the free market does not
• Obamacare benefitted more people than it harmed
• Slavery in America was uniquely more terrible than slavery elsewhere
• “Nixon won because all the racists came over to the GOP, and stayed”
• “Nobody’s coming for your guns!”
• Boys and girls are identical in every way.
• “White privilege”, rather than class privilege, is a suffocating force in society. 
• “We’ve got twelve years to solve manmade global warming!”
• “Increasing public school funding directly benefits The Children!”
• Racism is in America’s very cultural DNA
• Religious faith is ignorance – it has nothing to do with meaning, merely a crutch for the intellectually vacant. 
• Blacks are more likely to be shot by police than whites
• Voter ID = “Voter Suppression”.
• The Second Amendment was intended to defend slavery 
• Rape culture dominates colleges – 1 in 5 women at colleges are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted
• Women are paid 3/4 as much as men for the same work
• “Children! In cages! It’s Trump’s fault!”
• LIfe only begins when the baby emerges from the birth canal.  
• “90% of the people want “universal” background checks on guns!”
• “Abortion is about womens’ health!”
• “Trump attacked women!”

UPDATE 12/18: Adding reader comments. 

• Trump trying to appeal to black voters is voter suppression!
• “There’s evidence that Trump has committed crimes!”
• “Impeachment is a serious inquiry into Presidential abuse of power.”
• “We must remove Trump to preserve Constitutional norms.”
• The “Scandal free Obama administration.”
• “Jimmy Carter was a good president.”
• Social spending is “an investment”
• Immigrants are a benefit to society (as a blanket statement)
• Gay marriage is all about love.  Not politics. 
• School choice hurts poor people
• Trump had sex with “Stormy Daniels.”
• Trump paid Daniels hush money, Daniels did not blackmail Trump
• There is 97% scientific consensus on global warming
• All of our problems can be solved by raising taxes on the wealthy
• That’s not who we are!
• We’re on the right side of history
• “If ________ saves the life of just one child” then some usurpation, oppression or indignity is “worth it”. 

What else? 

Please respond in the comments.   

Responses that are not direct answers to the question – i.e. Democrat chanting points – will be removed. 

You could almost sense it, coming everywhere from Democrats on social media to progs in the dead tree media; this was going to be the UK election that set so much right in the UK, undoing Brexit and re-setting the left’s agenda…

…and telegraphing the public mood about Trump and the rise of other populists in the west.

Well, they were half right.

Mr Johnson’s snap General Election gamble paid off as he romped home with an estimated majority of 78.
The ecstatic Tory boss said his “stonking” win has given him a “powerful mandate to get Brexit done” as humiliated Jeremy Corbyn vowed to quit.
The results mean Britain’s political chaos could finally be over, leaving Mr Johnson with the numbers to finally push his Brexit deal through Parliament in just weeks.

I’m trying to remember the last time anyone had an absolute majority. Under Thatcher?

The final count:

• The Tories: 364
• All the rest: 284. Labour was 203 of ’em.

So Jeremy Corbyn, the standardbearer for European-style Democrat Socialism, who explicitly walked hand-in-hand with his closest American counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has gone down in flames.

So that leaves Democrats in the US with a rousing anti-mandate from the UK (which has at times been a bellwether for sentiments in the US as well, as in the 1979 contest that put Thatcher in office), with a field of frauds, flyweights and, well, Labour candidates.

Which will leave them to flog their impressively vacuous articles of impeachment into a rallying cry for the legion of the invincibly ignorant.

Which, history shows, isn’t a bad strategery for them, but isn’t necessarily airtight.

Start running down the list of bald-faced lies – stuff no rational person believes – that Democrat politicians say with a straight face, straight into the camera, over and over and over.

It’s a long, long list:

• “Trump’s election was illegitimate!”
• “We’ve got more ‘gun violence’ now than ever before!”
• “The ‘Republican War on Women'”
• “Nixon won because all the racists came over to the GOP, and stayed”
• “Nobody’s coming for your guns!”
• “We’ve got twelve years to solve manmade global warming!”
• “Increasing public school funding directly benefits The Children!”
• “Children! In cages! It’s Trump’s fault!”
• “90% of the people want “universal” background checks on guns!”
• “Abortion is about womens’ health!”
• “Trump attacked women!”

I’ve only scratched the surface, of course (Indeed, I should start compiling a master list).

Why is this?

This tweet really explains it:

And the Dems’ leadership knows it to be a fact.

Which is why they keep flooding the zone with so much utter twaddle. If their “market” weren’t buying, they wouldn’t be selling.

Even if the FBI had a good faith basis to open the inquiry, it did not have one to continue the inquiry.  
And what about all those unmaskings? FBI wiretaps Trump campaign, gives information to Susan Rice in the White House, and it ended there? Nothing got forwarded to the Hillary campaign? Do we believe that?
Joe Doakes

If The People can’t trust the institutions that ostensibly protect democracy, then democracy is in trouble. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Santa Clause: “Thanks for coming, Larry.  I understand you’re not happy being an ordinary elf, making toys and wiggling your ears and saying “hee hee” and “ho ho” and stuff like that.  Is it true?”
Larry the Elf: “Oh, no, Santa. I love making toys and singing in the elf choir.”
Santa: “Larry, this is me.  Santa.  I know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.  Straight up, Larry, are you happy in your work?”
Larry: “Okay, yeah, it’s true.  I’m tired of manual labor and I hate singing.” 
Santa: “So what would you like to do, instead?”
Larry: “Well, Hermie got transferred to the dental clinic.”
Santa: “You want to be a dentist?”
Larry: “No, I want to be an accountant.”
Santa: “It’s worse than I thought.  Okay, tell you what.  I’m creating a new position for “Regulatory Compliance Officer.”  It’s a big responsibility but I’m sure you can handle it.  Want to give it a try?”
Larry: “Would I?  Oh, thank you, Santa, it’s Christmas come early for me.  I won’t let you down.” 


Three weeks later . . . 
Larry: “Thanks for seeing me, Santa.  I have a few things that need your decision.”
Santa: “Sure thing, Larry, fire away.”
Larry: “First off, I have letters from Norway, Greenland, Russia, and United States, all claiming jurisdiction over the North Pole and asserting we owe delinquent taxes.  How should I respond?”
Santa: “Tell them to pound snow.”
Larry: “Our no-fault insurer wants to know if you use your sleigh in business and how many miles per year.
Santa: “Refer them to Clement Moore, he documents all my travel arrangements.”
Larry: “The INS denied your application for a one-night visit.  Without a visa, we’ll have to cancel Christmas in America.  What are you going to do?”
Santa: “I aim to misbehave.” 
Larry: “Santa, I’ve got another hour’s worth of issues from liability waivers for walking on slippery roofs, to appeals from naughty children who didn’t get toys, to those animal-rights activists with the “Free Rudolph” signs. But I’m getting the impression that you don’t care about complying with regulations.  So what’s the point of my job?”
Santa: “You see, Larry . . . .”
***
Choose your own story.  What’s Santa’s reply?
Joe Doakes

As this is written, Saint Paul is getting around the plowing non-emergency streets. Sort of. Tonight and tomorrow will be the big nights for clearing Friday and Saturday’s fairly significant snowfall.

Guess who didn’t have to wait?

Mayor Carter.

And Public Works director and former City Council boss-lady Kathy Lantry:

But the city’s plows got everyone in the area – right?

Please. It’s Saint Paul – AKA “Animal Town”. And it appears some animals may just be a little more equal than others:

So that’s why property taxes are rising – to make sure our ruling class gets the level of service to which it’s accustomed.

Kamala “Boss Hogg” Harris has departed the Presidential race because racism…

…and not because she hasn’t gained any traction…

…with Democrats, who seem to have an all-white (plus Fauxcahontas) debate panel?

Democrats are so confusing.

This is the Associated Press, over the weekend:

In a sense, they have a point: I’ve been gleefully urging Democrats to push impeachment without rest almost since Trump was elected, seeing it as at best a goldmine for Trump, and at worst a gateway to a candidate I’d have actually supported on my own in 2016, Mike Pence, to the Oval Office.

But it’s almost like they want citizens to think that impeachment was part of some GOP/NRA/Heritage-Foundation/Military Industrial Complex plan to make the Democrats look like idiots.

And the worst thing is, Democrat voters will probably believe it.

Nobody needs more than one car. Nobody needs to drive a car more than once a month. There should be psychological profiles and strict background checks for all vehicle transfers, including loans to friends and rent a cars. A 6 gallon gas tank limit is plenty.

No wonder the Democrats and media are pushing the “impeachment effort” so hard; Warren is insane, and she’s the sanest of the bunch (among those who have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting nominated – sorry, A-Klo and whoever that flavor of the month from Hawaii was…).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Elizabeth Warren is tired of freeloading billionaires.  They should pay their fair share.
She’s got a point.  Nobody needs a billion dollars.  At some point, you’ve got enough money, right? 
But what is that point?  A billion?  A million?  A hundred thousand?  The underlying motivation is not economics but envy, which judges the rich to be “anyone who has more than I do.”
Joe Doakes

Modern progressivism is entirely about catering to humanity’s basest instincts.

Alleged presidential candidate Kamala Harris on how she’ll solve the “crisis” in pharmaceutical prices:

Wait.

Wasn’t Trump supposed to be the wannabe dictator?

Famous not-actual-Native American Elizabeth Warren, who was not fired from a job for being pregnant, didn’t actually send her kid to public school.

But it took other people, in every case, to make that info public.

The school thing? Oh, yeah:

Sarah Carpenter, a pro-school choice activist who organized a protest of Warren’s Thursday speech in Atlanta, told Warren that she had read news reports indicating the candidate had sent her kids to private school. Though Warren once favored school choice and was an advocate for charter schools, she changed her views while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
“We are going to have the same choice that you had for your kids because I read that your children went to private schools,” Carpenter told Warren when the two met, according to video posted to social media, which was first identified by Corey DeAngelis, director of school choice at Reason Foundation.
Warren denied the claim, telling Carpenter, “My children went to public schools.”
A school yearbook obtained by the Washington Free Beacon indicates, however, that Warren’s son, Alex Warren, attended the Kirby Hall School for at least the 1986-1987 school year, Warren’s final year as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The college preparatory school is known for its “academically advanced curriculum” and offers small class sizes for students in grades K-12. The yearbook indicates that Alex Warren attended as a fifth grader.

Running as she is for the nomination by party for which an outsized share of delegates work for the Teachers Unions, it makes good sense to throw black families under the bus (and promising “historic investments” is exactly that).

Except within the Democrat party.

…I was going to say “shark”, but it’s really just a 50-something ninny with ELCA Hair and a shark fin taped to their collar who identifies as a shark.

Minnesotans’ main concerns about healthcare – about which the MMA is putatively supposed to be concerned, itself – are affordability and access.

Naturally, they’ve made gun confiscation among their top priorities for the 2020 Legislature:

In the recent report outlining priorities for 2020, Gun Control is listed as number 2, above any policy that would drive down the cost of healthcare or increase access to patients.
The priorities outlined by MMA include:

2.    Prevent firearm injury and death 
a.    Expand criminal background checks to all firearm transfers and sales
b.    Enact a “red flag” law to allow law enforcement to protect those who may be a danger to themselves or others
c.    Authorize the use of firearm ownership data for public health research or epidemiologic investigation

Naturally, none of their proposals have anything to do with health.  

It’s a further step down the path toward “progressivizing” all institutions.  

We need to have a word to convey the most commonly-used idea in conservative media criticism. The idea, to wit, is:

Can you imagine what the media would do if a Republican had done something this stupid?

It is, of course, one of the most evergreen concepts in media criticism – the notion that if it weren’t for double-standards, the media would have no standards at all when covering Democrats.

South Bend mayor and current media flavor of the month Pete “No, I’m Not Beto O’Rourke” Buttigieg’s campaign used stock photos of Kenyans in publicizing their policies for black Americans:

[A reporter for The Intercept] tweeted that the public relations firm tasked with creating Buttigieg’s campaign material had simply taken a stock photo without checking the origin of the subject. “On top of everything else, the Buttigieg campaign used a stock photo from Kenya to promote its Frederick Douglass Plan for Black America,” Grim wrote on Twitter, adding, “The woman in the photo reached out to me very confused.” 

Using non-American black people in photos (“hey, they all look the same!”) the same week as he used names of black endorsers who’d not endorsed him?

And yet the story is getting no coverage outside the conservative media.

And saying “Can you imagine if a Republican did this?” is time-consuming.

We need a word, or at least a snappy phrase.

Ideas?

The Smartest Woman Ever and her daughter, Chelsea “The Ryan Winkler Of New York” Clinton, wrote a book about great women.  

And of course – you could see this coming – they left out “arguably” the greatest woman of the 20th Century. 

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton haven’t included Margaret Thatcher in their book of “gutsy” women@HillaryClinton tells @EmmaBarnett that Thatcher didn’t try to “make a positive difference” for other women

🎧Full interview: https://t.co/VqEUpMJ4jd#EmmaBarnettGetsAnswers pic.twitter.com/GDyYigC2pG

— BBC Radio 5 Live (@bbc5live) November 12, 2019

Just going to take a moment to remind you that Berg’s Eighth Law is not called “Berg’s Eighth Tactful Hint”:

American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder

Come for the Berg’s Eighth Law.  Stay for the thrashing around seeking relevance.  Margaret Thatcher made a positive difference.   Hillary Clinton made only a negative one – being an awful and tone-deaf enough candidate to get even Donald Trump elected president.  

Partly because their candidates re either insane or senile. 

And party because it beats trying to explain what they’ve actually done.  

Four years ago, Democrats got a little crusty when you pointed out that, underneath the targets of their respective rhetoric, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had a lot in common.

Both preached an implausible platform that grabbed a lot of people who wanted (and want) a politician to “Fix things”, sure. Beyond that, both of them were America-firsters, although Sanders only manifested that through wanting to keep American jobs in the US (via economically ruinous means, natch).

And now – well, the same goes for Warren:

Warren’s catchphrase, “I’ve got a plan for that,” has as much cultural resonance with her base as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” does with his, and it’s remarkably similar to Trump’s “I alone can fix it.” It tickles the intellectual erogenous zones of a certain type of progressive wildly overrepresented in the upper echelons of the meritocracy. It screams: “We have all the answers!” and “We know what to do!”
Technocratic liberalism isn’t just an ideological worldview dating back to Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift and Mastery, it’s a cultural orientation. If you can’t see it, it’s probably because you’re part of it. Fish don’t know they’re wet, after all.

The media loves to point out the craziness and impossibility of many of Trump’s promises. He said fixing health care would be “so easy.” He vowed to eliminate the deficit in eight years. (It’s up nearly 50 percent since he took office). He was going to ban Muslims and make Mexico pay for the wall. Whether his supporters believed him or not, they liked what these promises said about his priorities. “Don’t take him literally,” we were advised, just “take him seriously.”

Demogogs gonna demigog.  

Ilhan Omar, credibly charged with marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud, is pretty.  Not a Hollywood knockout, but pretty.  Katie Hill, who just got caught in a three-way sex scandal, is pretty.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, promoter of the Green New Deal, is pretty.  They’re all young, pretty, first term members of Congress and they’re all having trouble – with family, party, and the media.  I think I see the problem. Congress is unfair to pretty girls.
Everybody knows that pretty girls don’t have to.  They don’t have to . . . anything.  They don’t have to worry about finding a date for the dance, they don’t have to wait in line to get into the nightclub, they don’t have to pay for dinner or drinks.  Pretty girls do whatever they want and everyone lets them get away with it, because they’re pretty.
But suddenly, these pretty girls get to Washington and Congress has weird rules expecting pretty girls to act the same as ugly girls and dweeby boys and OLD people. That’s ridiculous. They’ve never had to play by those rules their entire lives.  Like they’re going to play by them now?  Totally unfair.
Joe Doakes

And with all the people identifying as pretty girls these days, it’s gonna get outta hand.

You thought the DFL was crazy-left?

It is.

But tomorrow’s DFL is demented batspittle-crazy:

A bevy of progressives are challenging longtime Democratic incumbents in the Legislature in next year’s elections, potentially sending more women, millennials and people of color to the State Capitol while shifting the DFL dialogue to the left.
The movement is a muscular show of influence among emerging voter blocs that have already transformed the DFL coalition but now seek the real prize: an election certificate that will earn them a seat at the table and the opportunity to move billions of dollars in state funding.

Farther to the left than Alice “The Phantom” Hausman?

Oh, yes.

Tanner Sunderman, a 25-year-old Roseville resident challenging longtime Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul in the first-ring suburbs, said now is the time. “We’re done waiting,” he said.

On election night 2018, watching the disappointing results, I urged conservatives not to go off the ledge; Democrats with power are like crack addicts with a stolen Amex card. They just can’t stop.

California congresswoman Katie Hill is a pretty loathsome person (and that’s without even referring to  her ideology, which seeks to do to the entire country what it’s done to Califonia, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, NOLA and Baltimore), whose sex scandal – she was apparnently doing with her husband (asterisk; west coast version), a female campaign staffer, and another guy on the side – is nothing more than her doing with three other people what the entire Democrat party is trying to do to the United States without the courtesy of buying dinner [1] first…

…but this article (which has NSFW photography, unless you work in a pr0n theater, an art gallery, a tabloid, or the curriculum office of a blue-city elementary school), among many others, makes a key story point out of the notion that she has a  “Nazi” tattoo in the headline – a reference to a tattoo visible just outside her fun zone in one of the bluer photos in the article

Thats just wrong.

The Iron Cross was the emblem of Prussia, and then the German monarchy, for hundreds of years, up until 1918, and of the Republic until 1933. The Nazis kept it around as a decoration (the “Iron Cross” was sort of like the American “Bronze Star”), but it was German, not Nazi.

Those Eisernkreuze can be distinguished from the regular German ones by the, y’know, swastika the Nazis incorporated.

It’s what the kids call “Cultural Appropriation” these days.

But after the war, the “Eisernkreuz” survived Germany’s stringent “De-Nazification” with flying colors, seventy years ago, to become part of the utterly non-Nazi Federal Republic’s regalia. It is still the emblem of the German military; you find it today on all German planes, tanks and ships.

Not defending Ms. Hill – that’s MSNBC’s job. Just checking facts.

Something nobody in the media seems to care about doing anymore.

[1] And heaven forefend the Democrats socialize “dinner”; it’ll be a 2,000 page bill that costs $400 billion a year for ten years and feeds us dogfood.

Without government, who would “inspect” the retro-pinup girls before they visit vets at the VA?

Pin Ups for Vets received an email from the San Diego Veterans Hospital on Monday banning the calendar and telling them the outfits of their volunteers must be scrutinized in advance. Additionally, the costumed volunteers will not be allowed to hand out their signature calendar.
“It’s insulting that our outfits have to be preapproved,” Gina Elise told the Washington Examiner. “It feels like it’s discriminatory behavior. Is that happening with every single visitor that comes in the hospital?”

Feeling proud, yet?

2015: “There is no deep state, paranoid conservative”.

2019: “Of course, there’s a deep state. And it’s a wonderful thing”.

Of course, it’s only Michelle Cottle, who is a one-woman argument in favor of a gender pay gap.