Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama supposedly issued some Executive Orders relating to guns.  Both sides are in an uproar.  But wait – what did he actually do?

The White House has a website, naturally.  It lists all Executive Orders.  There are no new orders relating to guns.

Okay, well, maybe the orders were issued but staff is slow updating the website?  No, his speeches and remarks are right up-to-date.

So maybe they’re not technically Executive Orders, maybe they’re some other Presidential Action?  Doesn’t look like it.  The only new Presidential Action relating to guns is a memo directing the AG and the Army telling them to put together a research proposal to investigate the possibility of inventing some future technology that might make guns safer someday.

The White House did post a FACT SHEET about guns.  It refers to Executive Actions.  Is that the same as Executive Orders?  Apparently not.  Looking through the Actions, we find:

 

1. ATF is finalizing a rule clarifying who needs an FFL to sell a gun.  The federal rule-making process is a well-established procedure for making administrative law, this isn’t a spontaneous action by the President

2. The Attorney General sent a letter telling states to follow the law and also held a conference call.  That’ll take a bite out of crime.

3. The FBI will hire more people to do background checks.  Good, they’ll need help processing all the applications generated by panic over the media’s reporting of the President’s unconstitutional power grab – which doesn’t seem to have happened, yet.  Keep reading.

4. Democrats want to spend more money, $500 million for mental health care.  This is, in fact, the right place to spend money because the mental health system is a disgrace that all too often leads to tragedy; but considering the history of Democrat spending, I’m not convinced any of the money actually will reach the mentally ill.  Instead, I fear it’ll end up being block grants to mental health advocacy groups who will hold picket signs and issue press releases demanding . . . another $500 million.

5. Social Security will begin the rulemaking process to strip seniors of their right to self-defense, if they mis-manage their finances. Rulemaking takes forever and mis-managing your finances isn’t the same as posing a danger to yourself of others.  I doubt that proposal will go anywhere.

6. DHS is finishing up rulemaking to clarify that HIPPA does not prevent shrinks from reporting psychos to the background check folks.  Rulemaking, again, not bold new initiatives to make playgrounds safer.

7. ATF is proposing a rule to outlaw gun trusts used to hold title to machine guns, which have been used to kill exactly zero children and will do precisely nothing to make Americans safer.  More rulemaking, wait and see.

8. ATF issued a final a rule that gun dealers who lose a gun in transit must report it.  Not controversial, everybody supports that.

Frankly, I don’t see that the President did anything today.  This looks more like a publicity stunt to rally the base and deflect attention away from other administration failures, at home and abroad.  This Presidency started with vacuous promises of hope and change but it’s ending with tearful press conferences about memos and conference calls.  It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Joe Doakes

It does indeed look to be shaping up that way.

Reading the President’s “sweeping” new “gun regulations”, it occurs to me – I was right.

The “war on guns” is one of this electoral season’s candidates for “war on women”; it’s an attempt to get Democrat, especially Black, voters, to come out for an election where there won’t be The First Black President Ever sending tingles up peoples’ legs, and vote for a geriatric white woman.   If Obama, or any president, were serious about violence, he’d send the National Guard into Saint Louis, Baltimore, Oakland, Newark, Camden…

It is, like everything Obama has ever done, a lot of big talk combined with a few little nuggets of unconstitutional abuse of power.

With the help of our friends at the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, rather than read the bill, let’s just sort it out.

You’re Being Redundant, Again, All Over:  Restating things that are currently law, including:

• Background checks
• Calling for enforcement of existing federal gun laws; Obama’s prosecutions are down 30% over Dubya’s.
• Ensuring dealers notify law enforcement if guns are stolen.
• Denying the mentally ill the right to keep and bear arms, with due process, (although the Administration seems to want to remove due process from this)
• Asking communities to keep guns out of the wrong hands.  Paging Rahm Emanuel.  And Eric Holder.
• Ensuring dealers have federal licenses, and have criminal penalties for not complying with the rules
• Watching for large numbers of sales, in conjunction with other factors. This already happens.
• Ensure criminal data is forwarded to the NICS database from the states completely and promptly.

Talk, Talk, Talk:  Stuff the President can ask for, but needs Congressional approval and, most of all, funding:

• Funding for 200 new Keystone Kops.  Er, ATF agents.  Tomayto, tomahto.
• 500 million in mental health funding.
• Mining Social Security information for info about mental health.
• Funding for “Smart guns”.  Good luck with that.

Peace And Joy Through Memos:  Calls for sternly worded memos and announcements, including:

• Demanding the AGO write a letter to the states about coughing up mental health info
• Telling the AGO to write a memo about domestic violence

Even A Blind Squirrel Can Find A Nut:  There are a few things buried in the proposal that aren’t actually stupid:

• Overhauling the background check system to make it open 24/7, and cut down on bottlenecks.  This is especially important if Obama insists on constantly launching waves of panic-buying.
• Investigating illegal online trafficking in guns.  Presumably excluding Eric Holder.  But still.
• Defining responsibility for reporting thefts at the manufacturer/carrier/dealer level (might be good, provided it doesn’t merely serve as the basis for endless litigation)
• Help for the mentally-ill.

Have You Really Thought About This?:  The President mentioons “removing the stigma” of mental illness – in the same metaphorical breath as he demands taking guns from people at slightest sign of it.

Would You Like Hobnails With Those Boots?:  These are proposals that are completely unacceptable, and pretty much stupid to boot, including:

• If the President really is trying to put firearms trusts in the hands of politicized local cops, this will be a big problem.
• Denying guns to people whose finances are being a managed by Social Security, for no other reason.

You First, Barry:  Things like:

• “Smart” guns”.  I’ll use them, Mr. President, when your Secret Service detail does.
  • Not to mention the police, to say nothing of the military.  They won’t.  Either will I.

While the Democrats love to prate and gabble about “gun violence”, they stay rigorously clear on the one “gun safety” measure that has a proven record of, y’know, reducing gun crime – prosecuting criminals who use guns.

The federal legal framework for going after gun criminals has existed for a long, long time – but different administrations, shall we say, approach the issue with different degrees of vigor:

Hinderaker:

The Clinton administration talked a good game on guns–remember the “assault weapons” ban?–but when it came to actual law enforcement, its record was horrendous. (Someone should mention that to Hillary.) Things shaped up considerably under the Bush administration, which achieved record levels of gun-crime-related convictions. But when Barack Obama became president and Eric Holder took over the Department of Justice, enforcement went straight downhill. Over the course of the Obama administration, it has only gotten worse. Today, gun convictions are down 35% since the Bush administration peak in 2005 and 2006. Obama and Holder had an agenda, but it wasn’t law enforcement.

So on guns, as with regard to most other issues, Barack Obama is all talk. He isn’t interested in solving problems, he is just seeking political advantage. His corrupt administration can’t end soon enough.

Unless, of course, it’s replaced by something worse.

Two DFL Senators – Bev Scalze and Barb Goodwin, both women and long-time critics of back-slappin’ boys-club-member-in-good-standing Tom Bakk – are retiring from the Senate:

…For Scalze and others, the problems go beyond the disappointment of passing a budget that looked much different after Bakk and Daudt emerged from days of private negotiations with a deal in hand. It’s how leadership handled the final days of session.

Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, said many budget bills were controlled unilaterally, with little input or outreach to herself and other members. She and Scalze declined to put a number on how many Senate Democrats are upset, saying only to “look at the votes.”

Enough Democrats voted against three of the state’s seven budget bills that they required GOP votes to pass. Seven Democrats voted ‘no’ on three or more.

Take the environment budget, which just 10 Democrats — and 25 Republicans — voted to pass. Scalze said the finished product contained a surprise law change she and other members couldn’t stomach: exempting copper and nickel mines on the Iron Range from the state’s solid waste regulations. Bakk and other Senate DFLers represent swaths of the Iron Range.

“(Bakk) gave up a lot of stuff that other members had worked real hard on while he was getting everything he wanted for the Iron Range,” Goodwin said. “That kind of naked power is really not appreciated.”

Nobody who’s seen Tom Bakk will ever use the term “naked power” casually again…

…but the point is – wow.  It’s like the Dems have a war on women or something.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

What the world needs now, is tin pot mayors and local dept heads to flit off to Paris, to save the environment by telling everyone else to stop using fuel to flit about. And to agitate for more outdoor refrigerated hockey rinks so no child ever needs to know the tragedy of soft ice in a January thaw.

Idiots. Has all the class and sense of a local ordinance to condemn war in the holy land, or to admonish the Boko Harem kidnappers, or other sweeping consequential mouthings of liberal platitudes.

Check out the list of dept heads, bike czars, you name it. Anyone with a government expense account is getting in on this one. Exhibit director at the Science Museum? I suppose that makes them the anointed climate expert? What with having created from plaster of paris and scraps of cloth an exhibit that is every bit as scientifically sound as the so-called consensus evidence.

Also – look who’s paying for it. Some do-gooder group. Which is funded by tax dollars. Which are contributed by cities, run by the politicians who are getting a free vacation in Paris. Money-laundering their graft and pretending it’s noble effort to save the planet. They never hold these conferences in Darfur or Mogadishu.

joe doakes

If this were the private sector, the regulatory authorities would squat on it like a rhinoceros with diarrhea.

Joe Doakes from Como Park – who, let the record show, is an attorney – emails:

I don’t understand Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s legal analysis in charging the BLM shooter with assault with a deadly weapon.

When Black people protest, it’s a Constitutionally protected right.  If White people counter-protest, it should be just as protected, right?

Yes, I know, the White people said they were going to stir up trouble.  They know somebody who owns a Confederal flag.  They talked trash on video.  That’s bad manners, agreed.  But filming Black protestors and even calling them names is no less protected speech than burning a cross in somebody’s yard and we know that’s constitutional, decided decades ago in RAV v. St. Paul.  So going to the protest should be good.

If the White guys were racially offensive in implementing their counter-protest, does that negate the shooters self-defense claim?  The standard is:

1. Did not initiate the physical conflict, must be a reluctant participant.
2. Attempted to retreat by running away
3. Reasonably believed they were about to suffer great bodily harm at the hands of an enraged mob
4. Used reasonable force to repel the attack by firing a few rounds, only one of which injured anybody

I’m sure the prosecutor and the media will portray the White men as the aggressors, not as reluctant participants.  But that doesn’t sound right to me.  If you and I are having a heated discussion, the guy who throws the first punch is the aggressor, regardless how annoying the words are.

There might be such a thing as “fighting words” to justify a quick punch.  But there’s no such thing as “chasing-down-an-alley” words to justify a mob beating.  The Black mob initiated the threat of physical violence, the White men attempted to retreat and used reasonable force as a last resort.  I would think the shooter has a pretty good case for self-defense.  I would expect Mike Freeeman to see that.  I therefore conclude the assault charge is grandstanding to pacify the same mob that initiated the violence.  That’s not a good long-term strategy for maintaining public order.

Joe Doakes

“Progressive” politics is always a matter of balancing respective mobs of constituents, usually against each other.

Russia bars George Soros’ “Open Society Project” from Russia.

A Berg Administration would recognize them as a bigger long-term danger to this country than ISIS or Al Quaeda.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

He claims to have God-like powers and therefore is entitled to do whatever he wants to do.

But he doesn’t actually have any powers; it’s all billowing smoke and scornful talk.

But people Believe he has the powers, so they let him get away with doing whatever he wants to do, just as if he actually did have the powers.

Until Toto pulls back the curtain; then, the fraud is revealed.

We need Toto around here.  The sooner the better.

Joe Doakes

The big difference?  The Wizard of Oz protested the truth of his powers until he couldn’t anymore.  Obama seems to have checked out even as the little yappy dogs swarm over his administraiton.

The biggest news this past year is the general consensus (among those who are paying attention) that Barack Obama is worse – much worse – a president than Jimmy Carter.  He’s more along the lines of Woodrow Wilson or LBJ.

Ed Driscoll on how apt the LBJ parallel actually is:

Between the race riots, the campus riots, the massive expansion of the federal government and the concurrent belief in its infallibility, the military debacles overseas, a feeling in general that the nation was out of control and now this latest call for the wise men to bail him out, it really does feel like we’re living out the last year of the Johnson administration, doesn’t it? Funny, when Democratic operatives with bylines were submitting Tiger Beat-style articles in 2007 and 2008 dreamily forecasting which Democrat presidencies Obama’s would most closely resemble, LBJ’s rarely made the list. Wonder why?

We’ve gone around and around with Representative Kim Norton of Rochester.  Norton, who is retiring from the Legislature after this coming session, is going to be carrying Michael Bloomberg’s water; she’ll be sponsoring, so we’re told, a number of gun control bills.

Not that you can get a straight answer out of her; although she went into great detail in the Rochester Post-Bulletin in which she called for a “conversation about guns”, she also told anyone who wanted to engage in dialog (as opposed to echo-chamber monologue) that she really had no idea what she was going to put into any bill, and had nothing to talk about.

Which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it.

Of course, on Twitter over the holiday weekend, she found a specific proposal to support – from Bloomberg’s chief streetwalker in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand.

And her response (below) to MNGOPAC leader Bryan Strawser is one for the record books, and one that every Rochester voter should take up with Ms. Norton:  That’s right – for opposing denying civil rights to people who wind up on a non-transparent, easily-abused, unsupervised grab bag of names collected so willy-nilly it’s become the stuff of folk legends, for which the Feds don’t have to tell why, or even whether, you’re on it, Rep. Norton, one of the DFL’s inner circle thought leaders, equates you with a terrorist.

Remember when Democrats were opposed to mysterious starchambers handing down secret lists of enemies, with no transparency or accountability?  I’ll bet Rep. Nortdon does.

This is today’s DFL.

Question:  Do you suppose anyone in the media will question Rep. Norton on this?

(SCENE:  Major Thomas ASHTON and Sergeant Major Iain MACTAGGART, members of the British 22nd SAS Regiment – Britain’s premiere Special Forces unit – are standing by a helicopter pad.  Both are suited up for a mission that nobody will confirm is a hostage rescue mission deep into ISIS territory; guns, ammunition, grenades, radios, and survival gear)

ASHTON: Should be a bit of a dustup, eh, MacTaggart?

MACTAGGART:  Aye.  Not the first bloody time, Major.

ASHTON: True.   All right, Sergeant-Major.  Let’s check the men’s kit.  This is going to be a nasty one.

(An orderly – Royal Air Force communications specialist Aircraftman Sheila O’RIORDAN – jogs up to ASHTON with a piece of paper.  She stands at attention and salutes the Major)

ASHTON (taking the paper):  Yes?

O’RIORDAN:  Flash message from Ministry of Defense, sir.

ASHTON:  Thank you.  Dismissed.

(O’RIORDAN salutes.  ASHTON returns the salute.  O’RIORDAN jogs back to the radio tent)

MACTAGGART:  So w`hat’s MOD say, Major?

ASHTON:  President Obama has declared a climate conference.  ISIS has surrendered.

MACTAGGART:  ISIS couldn’t face the onlaught of Powerpoint, eh?

ASHTON:  Sounds like the mission’s off.

MACTAGGART:  Peace has broken out?

ASHTON:  Yes, Sergeant-Major.

(Both men stand for a beat – and then erupt in laughter)

MACTAGGART:  I’ll tell the helos to spool up.

ASHTON:  Right.  Wheels up in ten.

(And SCENE)

SCENE:  Abu Bakr AL-BAGHDADI, leader of ISIS and self-proclaimed “caliph” of the new “Khelifa” or Caliphate, is in a conference with a group of his lieutenants, including Sheikh Abu Ali HABIB.

AL-BAGHDADI:  Reports from the front look good.  We’re holding the Kurds, we’re gaining ground in Syria, and the Iraqis are folding like  a Salafist end-table.

LIEUTENANTS:  Allahu Akbar!

AL-BAGHDADI:  And the Great Satan is reacting as we expected; with dithering disguised as grand pronouncements.

LIEUTENANTS:  Insh’allah!

HABIB:  Caliph, I have some bad news.

AL-BAGHDADI:  What is it, Sheikh?

HABIB:   Little Miss Satanette – President Obama (group snickers) is holding a…

(HABIB pauses, catches breath)

….climate change conference.

(Entire group cringes in horror)

AL-BAGHDADI:  That does it.  Let’s give up.  Find an evangelist; I’ll devote my life to Christ.

(Entire group pauses for a silent beat – then breaks into uproarious laughter)

And SCENE

(SCENE:  Two Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Ali and Sayid, are manning a Russian-built machine gun, scanning a valley warily, watching for ISIS movement.  Suddenly, the radio crackles)

RADIO:   Kebab Six to all Kebab.   President Obama is holding a climate change conference.  Six out.

ALI:  (scanning with binoculars)  Well, I’ll be.

SAYID:   What?

ALI:   (Hands Sayid the binoculars)  Look!

SAYID:  (Looks through binoculars)  Wow.

(Cut to scene through binoculars.  ISIS troops are climbing out of foxholes, hurling their weapons, ammunition and webgear into the distance, and running away, leaving a cloud of dust behind them)

ALI:  Huh.  Don’t see that every day.

SAYID:  Like I’ve been telling you, Ali – it’s all about the climate.

ALI:  Gotta hand it to you.  When you’re right, you’re right.

And SCENE

Employment up between 2000-4000%…

…in ISIS.

The amount of money and property seized by county attorneys and police in this country has exceeded the amount stolen in all reported burglaries.

Jow Doakea from Como Park emails:

Secretary of State Kerry’s remarks about Paris. Revealing quote:

“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance?”

The official representative of the Obama Administration says the cartoonists deserved it, but shooting up a rock concert – that’s just wrong. This is a perfect example of the elitist attitude and a perfect explanation why American public policy is so messed up.  

There was no urgency to address terrorism when the people being killed were Jews or ambassadors or cartoonists. There was no problem because it did not involve an elitist, safe in the cocoon of privilege and tucked away in government offices or behind Ivy League walls. But now there is a problem: now, Islamic terror could harm people in Kerry’s strata of society. Now, terrorism is indefensible and intolerable.  

It’s the same elitist attitude towards gun control. 50 young Black men shot in Chicago ghettos is part of their colorfully diverse culture, 100 rural White men committing suicide were probably hateful racists anyway, but one nut with a gun at college or a theatre – that’s indefensible and intolerable because he might accidentally harm one of the elite. 
And swarms of immigrants/refugees aren’t a problem – on the contrary, they provide a ready supply of nannies and gardeners, meat packers and computer programmers, cheap and disposable and if you don’t like it, you should leave – but wait until we suffer a European-style invasion and suddenly there are millions of scruffy people camping on the golf courses, beheading policemen, breaking into gated communities to loot homes for food and clothing – then it’ll be a problem requiring immediate action. Then, Korematsu will be dusted off and acclaimed as binding precedent. Mouthing pious platitudes about diversity and tolerance will become as unfashionable as waving a Confederate flag.
For people like Kerry, society must act when someone threatens their lifestyle, but not before.  
Elitism; it’s an ugly thing.
Joe Doakes

As I pointed out immediately after Sandy Hook, every year the equivalent of several classrooms full of children are killed in Chicago.  But since they don’t look like the children of NPR executives –  being all black and brown and all – nobody pays much attention.least all our “elites”.

The American Left is like a college girl with pathological daddy issues.

You can warn ’em and warn ’em, but they’ll still end up leaving the party with that a*****e you tried to warn them about:

Hitler: Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”, 1938.

And they’ll inevitably marry the most disgusting person in their social circle …

Josef Stalin; “Time”‘s Man of the Year in 1939 and 1942.

…because I don’t know why.  They’re girls with terrible daddy issues.  How the hell would I know.

And even after they get divorced from the disgusting guy, their judgment is never, ever quite right.

This is a tweet from Dan Kimmel, DFL candidate for the Minnesota House in District 56A.

What does Dennis Prager say? It takes an elite education to be this misguided?

I’m mostly putting it online to make sure it’s out there for the whooooole world to see.

Non-Update Update:  Kimmel withdrew from the race, after a burst of national attention to his tweet that caused even MNDFL chair Ken Martin to condemn the statement.

Here’s the deal; most DFLers, much as we disagree with them, can see the evil in what’s happening in ISIS territory.

But among the multiculturalists, there is a very strong current of moral equivalence, of unwillingness to “judge” other cultures by Western norms.  I’m not quite going to say “Dan Kimmel was just the one that got caught” – but if you talk with enough of the multi-culti crowd long enough, you know it’s not exactly wrong, either.

The big problem, of course, was that Kimmel apparently isn’t very well-educated about ISIS.  He – and pretty much everyone, really – should read, absorb and retain this article, for starters.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

During the two years that Hillary and Bernie were in the Senate together, they voted the same 93% of the time.

You know, if you’re going to vote like the Most Liberal Senator, you can’t really claim to be a Moderate, Centrist, Independent.

Joe Doakes

Check the media standards guide; only conservatives can be “extreme”.

Off-year election results around the country were a mixed bag.

And by “mixed”, I mean generally good for conservative Republicans nationwide, and six of one, half a dozen of the other in Minnesota.

Tinkering With Leviathan:   Saint Paul’s elections yesterday, were a victory for DFL zealots over DFL extremists.

The City Council gained two councilors who ran on an agenda critical of Mayor Chris Coleman.   This can, in some ways, be read as a very mild moderate win – Jane Prince, who ran unopposed in Ward 7, and Rebecca Noeker (who is currently leading by a razor-thin margin as the “Instant Runoff” counting slogs on and on in Ward 2) ran in opposition to Mayor Coleman’s profligate subsidies of favored businesses via “Tax Increment Financing”, as well as his botched plan to install parking meters on Grand Avenue to try to chisel revenue out of shoppers in Saint Paul’s only successful mid-market retail district.

But I wouldn’t count on much change from the Council on the larger issues that are sandbagging Saint Paul; the stifling regulatory environment, the obeisance to the Met Council’s lust for 19th-century transit, and the crime problems that are percolating along University and out on the East Side.

Meet the New Boss, Same As The Old Boss:  The Saint Paul School Board election, as predicted, installed the four union-backed wholly union-owned candidates over the four formerly union-owned candidates. Whatever residue of independence from the Teachers Union that might have existed in the Saint Paul public schools will be hunted down and buried in concrete shortly.

While changing Superintendent Silva’s intensely unpopular disciplinary policies may be one of the upshots of yesterday’s elections, look for the fiscal profligacy and unaccountability to accelerate.

The election will be a great boon to charter schools – if Saint Paul parents are smart.

Schools Dazed:  The referenda in the various school districts around the east metro went about 50-50; the pattern seemed to be, broadly, that voters approved the bond levies for maintenance and repairs, but voted down the big additions to infrastructure and programming.

Which may show – who knows? – that voters are still manipulable by demands “for the children”, but they have their limits.

We’ll see.

The Gathering Storm?:  Around the country, the news was less ambiguous.  A Republican not only won the Kentucky governor’s race. but so did his black Tea Party Republican Lieutenant Governor.  In VIrginia, Michael Bloomberg, hoping in his ghoulish way to capitalize on the deaths of a couple of TV reporters, pumped a ton of money and a lot of agenda into a couple of key races, with control of the Virginia state senate on the line.  It flopped; just as in Colorado a couple of years ago, only in the most addlepated coastal hothouses can gun control get any popular traction.

In Houston, a referendum on gay rights got swept away in a vote that would be hard to see as anything but a backlash against the creeping fascism of the Social Justice Warriors and their waves of lawsuits and coercion against supporters of traditional marriage.  And even in San Francisco, the sanctuary-city-promoting sheriff got sent packing.

It’s a year ’til the next election.  Look for “progressives” with deep pockets to spend a ton of money to try to iron out the wrinkles in the narrative.

There’s a school bonding referendum on the ballot this Tuesday; the district wants $250 million, on top of the huge bond they got two years ago, on top of all their state money.

There are campaigns, both against the bill and, naturally, for it.

Over the weekend, the Washington County Watchdog facebook page tripped upon a couple of giggly north-Suburban bobbleheads chuckling about stealing “Vote No” campaign signs – or, in one case, having her kids do it.

The Watchdog confirmed that one of the women is affiliated with/employed by the “Vote Yes” campaign.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Ads for used exercise equipment generally say things like “never used it” or “just gathering dust.” Not a compelling reason for me to buy.

Better ad copy would say “Lost enough weight to meet my goal, don’t need it anymore.”

Same applies to candidates for President. “Never held a real job but eager to run the entire economy” doesn’t move me to donate to you, but rather to hide my wallet.

“FREE BEER” used to be a joke so you’d listen to the real message. Now, it’s Bernie’s entire campaign slogan. No wonder he’s winning.

Joe Doakes

Well, winning among people who are inclined to vote for Bernie Sanders.

Which, unfortunately, given the devolution of our society, is a hell of a lot of people.

JoeDoakes from Como Park notes the same thing I did yesterday:

Global warming alarmists lie with statistics to panic the public, hoping they’ll react in fear instead of reason.

This article from Powerline explains how to make a chart look scary by changing the scale.

I think gun controllers do it, too. I’ll look for examples.

Joe Doakes

You can pretty much name the issue:  “war on women”; “Obamacare will lower the deficit”; Obama has added less to the debt than any president since the War; more gun laws equal less crime; the science is settled.

The Big Lie is a key part of the Democrat Party’s approach; to make up an alternate reality for their low-information base, without fear of being “fact-checked” by a media that is their PR agency Praetorian Guard.

Good old Saint Paul.

The business economy just continues to spiral down the vortex; it’s schools are a disaster for African-Americans and other minority students; it’s choking on traffic, and obsessed with choking it further.

But apparently none of that is so serious that the city, in its infinite wisdom, isn’t going to try to socialize… Garbage collection.

And the city, having learned so much for watching the Met Council jam down the Green Line, is going about getting its way the way it always does; anyway it has to to get what it wants.

A reader from Merriam park emails:

Gotta love this report– they received survey responses from 2,000 residents and conclude that based on those responses, “a majority of St Paul want organized trash collection.” They’ve also concluded that immigrants and minorities have too much trouble making decisions to make a good decision in choosing a trash hauler, so this is better for them. Of course, it doesn’t appear that they asked too many in the poorer neighborhoods of St Paul, since their map (see .pdf through link below) indicates that more than 800 responses came from Mac Groveland/ Summit Hill zip code.

The reports are at the link above.

But here’s the map of the survey responses:

So the “survey” drew 2,000 responses – and if we take each of the different “color” bands at their half-way point, it’s fair to estimate that 70-80% of them came from the city’s four most alpaca-wearing, Subaru-driving, NPR-listening, Jon Stewart-worshipping, Saint Olaf-alumni-ing, upper-middle-class, white, government-union-or-academia-employed, “Progressive” zip codes.

Seems pretty even-handed to me.

SCENE:  The handheld camera walks to the door of the basement headquarters of “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”.  A crudely hand-lettered sign on the door reads “Wingnuts NOT ALOUD”.   

The camera steps down the stairs into the hidden lair where the magic happens.  Around a table, eyes glued to TV in an entertainment center along the wall, are MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com’s writing staff; Aaron Roston, Gutterball Gary, Cat Scat, Leaky The Beagle, Betty Rae Torstengaardsen and Avery Librelle.   At the head of the table, slouching in a folding chair, nervously running his hand through his hair, is Edmund DuChey, wearing a name-tag that identifies himself as the “Publisher” and “Senior Managing Executive Editor” of MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com.  

The assembled group is watching as the closing credits roll on the Democrat debate.  Starting with DuChey, the group breaks into wan applause.  

GUTTERBALL GARY:  YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!  (Nobody bats an eye)

LEAKY THE BEAGLE:  (Speaking in an absurd phony German accent)  Very intereshtink.

CAT SCAT:  And every word was entirely true!  I Googled it!

AARON ROSTON:  Stupid wingnuts won’t know what hit them.

BETTY RAE TORSTENGAARDSEN:  You know what I liked about Bernie Sanders?  The positions he was talking about were almost identical to the positions of Nelson Rockefeller…

DUCHEY:  (hissing, making “puke” symbol with his finger) He was a Republican

GARY:  Rerthuglicon!

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  Right – the point is, the Democratic party of today is right about where the Republican party was in 1968.

ROSTON:  Right.  And not that different from President Johnson.

DUCHEY:  Peace be unto him.

LIBRELLE:  And that was a time when the US was at its political and economic peak.

SCAT: Let me Google that…yes.  It says so right here on “SmirkingChimp.com!”  It’s a fact!

DUCHEY: I just wanna tell the stupid ignorant wingnuts to suck on that:  when the US government was at its most progressive, we were at our economic and political peak.

BEAGLE:  Very intereschtink.

(A brief burst of static and feedback erupts.   A VOICE FROM ABOVE breaks in)

VOICE FROM ABOVE:  Oh, that’s just stupid, people.  Use your brains.  In 1968, the US was the world’s only significant economy.  Japan and Germany were just barely recovered from World War II.  South Korea was trailing North Korea, economically.   Singapore was a poverty-stricken third-world hellhole.  Russia and China were gangster playgrounds that could barely feed their own people – indeed, China was still suffering famines.  India was just descending into the nadir of its experience with socialism, and there was speculation that half of its people would starve to death by 1980.   And we were able to import whatever oil that we didn’t produce, at incredibly favorable rates from impoverished countries that were happy for the business.

In 1968, the US was one of two military superpowers – but it was the only economic superpower.  The entire world was its market.  So the likes of LBJ and Nelson Rockefeller could feel free to  write post-dated checks for fripperies like bottomless entitlement programs and count on the Growth Fairy to let future generations pay for them – because it’d worked just fine for…the previous 20 years or so.

We were like someone who’d just won the lottery, and was spending like there was no tomorrow.

ROSTON:  Who is that?

SCAT:  Let me google that…

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  It’s a voice from above…

SCAT:  Hah!  Johnson wasn’t president until 1972!  It says so on Crooks and Liars.com!

VOICE:  In the seventies, Germany and Japan’s economies became competitive with ours, and OPEC and Iran sent tremors through our economy by jiggling the oil market on  us.  In the 1980s, South Korea and Singapore became significant players.  In the 1990s, India threw off the worst excesses of socialism, and China pragmatically moved into state cartel capitalism, and suddenly they were legitimate competitors, too.

In other words, the US is no longer an economic hegemon.  Extremely powerful, yes – but not dominant in the way we were in 1968.  Which means we actually have to compete, and be smart.

So it’s fair and accurate to say that the US was at its political and economic peak in 1968 in spite of the likes of Rockefeller and LBJ, not because of them.  And that our position of extreme economic dominance made their variety of entitlement-based government sustainable, for a while, provided that we retained absolute economic supremacy over the entire world.

ROSTON:  This is freaky.

BEAGLE:  Yezz, it izzz

GUTTERBALL:  IT’S A SIGN!

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  What the…

(Camera cuts to exterior shot.  Mitch BERG, holding a bullhorn up to a window casing, looks into the camera lens, as he stands up to walk away)

BERG:  What?  I don’t get to have a little fun, too?

(BERG walks away to a waiting car, as the scene in the basement descends into panicky pandemonium)

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There will be no Social Security increase in 2016 because there is no inflation, according to the government.  But I notice that prices in the POS market are not slumping:

2004 Saturn L300. 133,000 miles. $2,750 or best offer.

2004 Ford Ranger. 65,500 miles.$9,500 OBO.

2000 Lexus ES300. 141K miles. $3900 or offer.

1997 GMC Safari. $2500 firm.

Lingering effect of the disastrous Cash for Clunkers program?

Joe doakes

The used car market has been utterly brutal since then.