Joe Doakes from Como Park emails

Muslim Congressman whose election was funded by terrorists is named to House Intelligence Committee with access to data on Muslim terrorists.

Shouldn’t be a problem. Remember all the Japanese-Americans appointed to War Committees after Pearl Harbor?

At the very least, it’ll save ISIS the bother of hacking into CentCom to find out what the US knows.

Joe Doakes

To be fair, there were all sorts of German-Americans intimately involved in wartime policy during both world wars.

Congressman Ellison’s problem is not that he’s Muslim; there are plenty of American Muslims who are just as American as the next guy.

It’s the fact that his relationship with chair were sponsoring organizations is “nuanced”: while he doesn’t come out of directly say he supports Hamas, preferring to claim to “support the Palestinian people”; he leaves it to the less informed to figure out on their own that “the Palestinian people” are led by Hamas, which killed off most of the competition, and allows little to no dissent.

…when Barack Obama was going to “restore respect for this nation” abroad?

Either does he.    The US was absent, in body and spirit, from a rally that even had Mahmoud Abbas and Benyamin Netanyahu walking together.

He really, really is a terrible president.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you still needed proof that Establishment Republicans were just as committed to status quo as Democrats, this would be the clincher.

Joe has a point – although I’m going to wait to see how the GOP conference votes on actual policy issues, rather than internal niggling.

If they screw the pooch on Keystone XL, IRS hearings, defunding Obamacare and the like, wake me up.

Young people are more miserable than ever under Obama, according to the “Young America Foundation” misery index:

Youth unemployment in 2014 was 18.1 percent (18.1 on YMI), with almost six million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in school or work. Many young people are simply giving up on finding employment.

Student loan debt for 2014 rings in at a record-breaking $30,000 (30.0 on YMI). Student debt has risen at an average of six percent per year since 2008, and today, 70% of college seniors graduate with student loan debt. In addition, the job market still hasn’t recovered, leaving many recent graduates with little or no income to pay back their loans.

National debt per capita for 2014 is the highest it’s ever been at $58,437 (58.4 on YMI). Young people will be stuck paying for government debt they had no part in creating, and they’ll have to do it with less discretionary income than ever before because of record-high levels of student loan debt.

Add it all up, and the YMI comes out to an astonishing 106.5 up from 98.6 in 2013.

I think the index needs to weight unemployment higher – it’s a much greater contributor to personal misery than the national debt, which is pretty abstract to most people (so far).

But it remains a fact that the kids that voted for Obama have got to be regretting the choice, someday soon here…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to urge us to “pretend”:

Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn’t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch – that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians and no doubt is shared by billions of people worldwide, today). How would he go about bringing America down to second or even third-world levels following the model of, say, Argentina?

• Alienate traditional allies. Check.
• Weaken military power, numbers and morale. Check.
• Nationalize major industry. Check.
• Weaken domestic energy independence, increase foreign dependence. Check.
• Widen wealth gap. Check.
• Reduce earners, increase idlers. Check.
• Use government employees to intimidate political opponents. Check.
• Crush middle class with regulations and taxes. In progress.
• Debase the currency by printing money. In progress.
• Debase the citizenry by flinging open borders. In progress.

So what’s next on the agenda? What will it take to bring the USA down to the economic, military, social and political level of, say, Spain?

Joe Doakes

About the only thing he hasn’t done is enlist Visigoths and Vandals into the military as auxiliaries.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan had to deal with a fairly sharp, intense recession, with some fairly intense “negative growth”:

1981 Q04: -4.5895

1982 Q01: -6.5220

1982 Q02: 2.1923

1982 Q03: -1.4300

For those of you who weren’t around back then?  It was a nasty little downturn, especially coming on the heels of the sluggish, stagflation-addled seventies.

1982 Q04:  0.3890

1983 Q01:  5.3465

1983 Q02:  9.4443

1983 Q03:  8.0625

1983 Q04:  8.5095

1984 Q01:  8.1868

1984 Q02:  7.2118

Long before he started stretching the Constitution out of shape, Obama broke one other, less formal rule – really more of a truism:  as a very broad rule, sharp recessions, left on their own, tend to have sharp recoveries.  Reagan’s recession was a sharp, intense one, accompanied by the worst unemployment since the Great Depression (only tied in late 2009 by Obama’s recession).

And Reagan got out of the way, and let the market heal the economy (except of course the defense sector – but then, that’s never part of the “free market”) heal itself.

And it came roaring back much bigger and better than ever.

Obama, of course, took office in the midst of another sharp, intense downturn.

And six years later, he’s doing the end-zone happy dance as he claims a 5% growth in GDP.

Now, let’s presume for a moment that that 5% “growth rate” is organic (although it most assuredly is not).

It’s six years into a sharp recession.   Left to its own devices – without “Quantitative Easing”, without “Too Big To Fail” and skyrocketing energy prices, without Obamacare – we should have been seeing much better growth than this…

…in 2010 or 2011.

But during the Obama Recession, like the Great Depression, the economy was left to pretty much the opposite of “its own devices”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Rush Limbaugh said, about President Obama: “I hope he fails.”

Naturally, he was ripped for it by every liberal and by every mushy RINO trying to make nice with the press.

Read the linked transcript.  It’s surprisingly prescient.  Looking back on what Obama has wrought these past six years, my question is: was Rush right?  Should we hope President Obama fails in his effort to completely destroy the America that I grew up in?

Joe Doakes

Politically-correct or not, I certainly have been.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama is relaxing the Cuban Embargo.  Why?  Why now?  As always – cui bono?

One of the first items changed is that telecommunication companies can do business in Cuba.

The richest man in the world is Carlos Sim who owns the Mexican phone system, is behind the whole “Obama-phone” fiasco and also is a huge contributor to Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

Campaign donor – telecommunications company – Cuban cell phone market – I’m beginning to get an inkling.

Joe Doakes

It’s a great time to be a liberal plutocrat.

33 years ago today, Eastern Europe seemed to be spiraling from crisis into deep crisis.

Poland’s communist government cracked down on the “Solidarity” movement.    In response, many Poles fled across the friendliest borders they could find.

And Poland’s ambassador to the US, Romuald Spasowski defected to the US – a capital offense in that Soviet puppet state.   We told that story a few years ago.

And it was in that moment, 33 years ago tonight, that Ronald Reagan showed what real leadership was. (The beef of the speech starts around 4:00 in)

When Reagan was in office, bad behavior had consquences; the Polish (and by extension Soviet) governments suffered.

Compare this with the vapid empty suit that’s currently in office, and the response the suit has had to provocations similar to the Solidarity Christmas.  Far from Reagan’s sharp, clear, principled response, Obama has propped up dictators like Assad, Castro and Chavez while undercutting the Poles, the Kurds, the Baltic States, the Ukrainians, and other freedom-seeking people around the world.

Compare, contrast, and think for a moment for how far this nation has fallen in 33 years.

If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren in 2016, the terrorists have won.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’re number One – in presidential motorcades. And room service tab.

Absolutely un-blinking-believable.

As my buddy quipped: “For that kind of money, we could have bought Port Au Prince and held all future meetings there, for free!”

Joe Doakes

It’s all getting just a little bit banana-republican.

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is waiting at the light rail station on University Avenue. 

Seeing Mitch Berg driving past, LIBRELLE leaps and, incredibly, sails through BERG’s passenger side window and lands sitting upright in BERG’s passenger seat.

BERG:  What the…

LIBRELLE:  Hahahahahahahahaha, Merg!    You and your conservative teabagger friends “won” the South!  Now, you can keep it?

BERG:  Um, right.  Mary Landrieu lost, leaving not a single Democratic Senator, Governor or Democrat-controlled Legislative chamber in the entire old Confederacy. 

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  You got all the racists!    The journey you started in 1968, when you inherited all the racists with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, is complete!  You guys got the KKK vote!

BERG:  You’re still babbling about the so-called “Southern Strategy?”

LIBRELLE:  Yes!  The racists, upset about the Civil Rights Act, all voted GOP!

BERG:  OK – let’s accept for a moment purely for sake of argument that the South is more “racist” than the rest of the country – which is deeply debatable, but again, it’s for argument’s sake – and that people vote first and foremost over racial issues. 

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  Absolutely!

BERG:  OK.  So the South voted for Nixon – but then, so did Vermont and California and, in 1972, Michigan, New York State, and even ultraliberal Minnesota.  So they’re all racists, too, right?

LIBRELLE:  The South were voting their consciences, though!

BERG:  Were they indeed?

LIBRELLE:  Even though these rhetorical questions of your always end up with me falling into a trap that makes me look stupid and uninformed, I’ll say “hell yeah!”

BERG:  OK – so the Democrats controlled every single southern Congressional delegation until 1994.  And the GOP didn’t win a majority of southern Governor’s offices, to say nothing of state legislatures, until well into the 2000s. 

By the way – the Klan hasn’t been a factor in Southern Politics since the sixties, maybe the seventies at the very latest.  So it would be more realistic to say that Republicans oversaw the extinction of mainstream racism in the Deep South. 

(BERG’s car pulls up to stoplight.  LIBRELLE steps out, walks between traffic to nearest train station).

BERG:  Avery?  Avery?

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

So those of you who follow this post through to the bitter end will be ten feet tall and armor plated in about fifteen minutes.

There’s an election in two years – and the Democrat Party has decided to try to kick off the battle via the medium of the popular song.

There are three contenders, and they’re all pretty freaking awful.

But American needs to know; what’s the worst of the noxious bunch?

Let’s meet the offenders.  Then let’s get down to voting.

Contender #1 – The Hillary Clinton Country-Western Song: This is Hillary’s opening bid for popularity in a part of the country that would rather catch a stream of projectile diarrhea than vote for Hillary Clinton.

It’s got everything that people in America’s heartland look for in a leader: central-casting “country” people; folksy abbreviations on videos (“Learnin’ Hindsight’s Always Right”, “‘Cuz Our American Dream’s At Stake”), because we like our videos to do their local patois the same way Hillary Clinton does it in her speeches – clumsy and patronizing; clunky, greasy references to inside-the-Beltway chanting points (“let’s smash that glass ceiling!”, indeed).

Hard to pick the biggest groaner; for my money, it’s the moment around 1:50, where the hot babe on the motorcycle gives the guy a ride on the back. That’s right, guys – you’ve been living in two-income families for a generation now, but deep down inside you’re all still sexists!

You just know some consultant – in my mind’s eye, “he” looks like Pajama-Boy – got major kudos for this idea. Maybe even got it stolen by a bigger consultant.

The video reportedly cost the Hillary PAC a million dollars to make.  I have a hunch most of it went to AFTRA fees for the guys in the band – the only four males in Los Angeles would could pull of “Country Western Band”.

Or is the worst song…

Fauxcahontas’s Faux Faulk Frenzy:  On the surface, it seems like Elizabeth “I Lied About Being Cherokee” Warren’s song couldn’t be any more different;  lazily-written, badly-sung pseudo-“folk” music is as organic to the cultural left as Whole Foods, Terry Gross or Gluten-Free Coffee.

And whomever produced this atrocity got some of the surface anti-glitz “glitz” as right as Hillary’s crew got “country” wrong.  “Run Fauxcahontas Run” has lots of the veneer of bad coffeehouse folk music; the big chorus stretches eleven syllables to cover fourteen syllables of rhythm; the dork-fingered guitar-playing sounds so much like it’s being played by a Sylvia-Plath-obsessed Vassar women’s studies major…

…that you know it can’t be.  It takes professionals – session musicians earning triple the musicians union scale – to play that badly, that well; it takes a professional singer to to edge that close to sounding like a lesbian slam poet without serving into pure caricature…

…as much as the lyrics do.

Before It Was Hilarious:  Of course, the control for this experiment was this little ditty from 2008, a classic hymn to The One…

…complete with adoring crowds chanting, Nuremberg-style, in the background.

Nothing more needs to be said, right?

Please?

A Time For Choosing:  OK – so what is the worst Hymn to a Candidate ever?

This may be the most important vote you take this year.

Who could have seen this coming – an administration that, for all of its chatter about “shovel ready jobs” and “infrastructure”, is hog-tied to its allegiance to academia and liberal plutocrats, having big trouble with working class voters, especially white ones? 

As the price of fuel, staple foods, education and healthcare skyrocketed, all that talk of blue-collar work evaporated. 

Glenn Reynolds writes:

That was actually an original part of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, but it was derailed by feminists within the Obama coalition who thought it would produce too many jobs for men. Christina Romer, then-chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, reported: “The very first email I got … was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

Well, if you’re offended by jobs for burly men, you probably won’t do well with working-class men, or with the working-class women who are often married to burly men. And, as Joel Kotkin notes, many other Obama policies — promoting urban density, which creates fewer construction jobs; fighting oil and coal extraction, thus targeting industries that create high-paying blue collar jobs; and even opening up immigration, which drives down wages for the working class — all seem designed to punish people who work for a living, even as expanded benefits for the poor seem designed to reward people who draw government checks for a living.

The parallels in Minnesota are – or should be – tantalizing to conservative Republicans; the DFL is even more the lapdog of urban academia and plutocrats than the national party; I’m not sure how Rick Nolan beat Stewart Mills, and I’m not sure he’ll do it again.  And when Collin Peterson finally retires in the 7th CD, that district will be Republican for a generation or two…

…entirely on the dynamics in Reynolds’ article.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama is a lame duck with delusions of royalty. He’s going to issue whatever Executive Orders he wants, knowing his hand-picked Attorney General won’t let Republican lawsuits affect his actions for years, if ever.

Republicans could impeach The First Black President, but Democrats have been slavering to be thrown in that briar patch, it’d set the Republican Party back a century.

Republicans’ only power is the purse. Maybe the Republicans should start advertising “Do not plan your vacation to visit any national parks or public monuments, Obama is going to shut them all down on July 1.”

He’ll do it in response to our shutting off the money, true; but why take the heat for it alone? Get out in front of him, for a change. Start telling people right now “There’s only one way to stop an out-of-control dictator so get ready for it, we’re shutting ‘er down.”

Joe Doakes

Watch for a media campaign claiming that the “power of the purse” is racist…

“Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County.  Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County.  Don’t focus on this.  Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County”.

Rock and roller and conservative icon Ted Nugent tweets about Obama’s response to Ferguson:

Obama’s empty neutrality, moral bankruptcy and political cowardice is now undeniable to even his most loyal cheerleaders and boot-lickers!

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) November 25, 2014

Well, Ted Nugent saying that sort of thing about Barack Obama barely rises to Dog Bites Dog, now, does it?

UPDATE:  Wait…

We’re already down to convention-planning time. 

And while the Democrat National Committee is pondering New York, Philly and Columbus, Ohio, Kevin Williamson has a more appropriate idea:

The Democrats, if they had any remaining intellectual honesty, would hold their convention in Detroit. Democratic leadership, Democratic unions and the Democratic policies that empower them, Democrat-dominated school bureaucracies, Democrat-style law enforcement, Democratic levels of taxation and spending, the politics of protest and grievance in the classical Democratic mode — all of these have made Detroit what it is today: an unwholesome slop-pail of woe and degradation that does not seem to belong in North America, a craptastical crater groaning with misery, a city-shaped void in what once was the industrial soul of the nation. If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit.

Not, he points out, that New York and Philadelphia aren’t headed in the same direction…

…”when Obama’s lost SNL, he’s truly lost” – I mean, nobody really thinks about SNL much any more, do they?

And yet…:

And the “funny” thing is, this is better “Journalism” than most of the mainstream media has done on the subject of Barack Rex’s overreach.

John Fund:

It’s no wonder that the White House and its allies aren’t citing the recent elections or polls in defending their actions. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken ahead of Obama’s move found that voters opposed him taking executive action without approval from Congress by 48 to 38 percent. Even among Hispanics, only 43 percent favored the action versus 37 percent who opposed it.

Look for this to be as far as the media (AKA “The Praetorian Guard”) to go in criticizing Barack Rex.

I’m starting to develop this theory that the Democrats’ “messaging” strategy is developing into something like this:

1. Tell voters pretty much whatever you think they want to hear.
2. Assume the voters are too incurious to check up on it.
3. There is no point 3.

Submitted as evidence:  Barbara Boxer’s speech against the Keystone Pipeline; I’ll emphasize the real howlers:

Not only would the construction of Keystone put no negative pressure on gasoline prices, an argument President Barack Obama has also made, but the California senator claimed it would have the precise opposite effect. “We’re going to see higher gas prices because of this,” Boxer insisted.

These and other comments delivered by Boxer over the course of her hours on the floor on Tuesday were equally confounding, but her most mystifying pronouncements were those in which she touted the bustling green economy of her home state.

“Ask yourself the question, is it worth exposing our people to these risks who I stood with shoulder to shoulder, and is it worth exposing the planet to these risks when we can create millions of jobs in a clean energy economy like we’re doing in my state,” she said. “And we’re going gangbusters!”

“I come from a state that is booming with hundreds of thousands of jobs with balanced budgets — clean energy future — and I come from a state that embraced cleaning up the environment and building the economy and jobs,” Boxer later added. “And they go hand in hand.”

Repeat after us:  Scarcity leads to lower prices; plenty leads to higher prices.  California is going gangbusters.  The budget – “balanced” via tax hikes – is sustainable; the California pension bubble isn’t going to burst.  Green energy is a goldmine for workers! 

It sounds good on camera.  It plays well with people who still think government still tells the truth, and that media will tell them if anything’s amiss.   It plays well with Gruber’s America. 

The question isn’t “has the Democrat party switched to an all-lie messaging strategy”.  The queston is “given their assumptions, why would they not go to an all-lie messaging strategy?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A few years back, the local media ran big stories about government workers getting huge raises despite tough times. Outrage followed.

Wasn’t true, of course, it was “accurate but false.” Turns out that public employees are paid on a 2-week pay period system instead of being paid on the 1st and 15th. We get 26 paychecks per year instead of 24. But every seven years, payday falls on New Year’s Day which is a holiday, so the check is cut one day early and that results in 27 pay checks issued during in that year.

Is that a raise? No – the employee keeps the same hourly rate of pay. The money would have been paid in the new year, but for shifting the payday backwards. It’s a fake controversy based on a calendar quirk. It’s like claiming a 63-year-old man is 9 years old because he was born on Leap Day so he’s only had 9 birthdays. Calendar quirk.

Look for those stories again this year.

Joe Doakes

People who put these sorts of things out there as if there’s not some sort of “gotcha” involved annoy me to no end.

Fauxcahontas:  n:  Elizabeth Warren.

The DFL has a long, filthy history of dropping hit pieces in the closing hours of campaigns that would make people who care about petty annoyances like “right and wrong” and ‘truth” puke up their skulls.  Classic example – this piece from 2010, which tried to whip up ingorant anti-Arab sentiment against King Banaian – who happens to be of Armenian descent. 

But the people who do Democrat “Farmer” Labor Party hit pieces don’t bother with right and wrong.  Their ends justify their means.

I cited this piece, dropped against Stacey Stout in House District 43B, on the show over the weekend.  I called it “Evil”. 

It is. 

Here’s the front:

Uh oh.  An abusive guy (are there any other kind in the DFL’s world?  Other than Pajama Boy, I mean?)

And here’s the back:

This ad proves that the DFL is counting on finding a plurality of incurious cretins.  And in 43A, it apparently worked. 

Let’s go through this point by point:

Stout, like most people who don’t see “people with swastika armbands” as a government model to emulate, opposed a DFL proposal to take guns away from people accused, as opposed to convicted, of domestic abuse. 

The “Gun Show Loophole” is a fraud; every gun show I’m aware of requires an NICS background check, and require a police-issued “Permits to Purchase” to buy a gun.  The bill the DFL refers to would have required people to transfer all firearms via a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer.  That means if you’re handing a gun down to your kid, or lending a shotgun to your friend for duck season.  This does nothing but raise the price of firearms (FFLs don’t work for free) and create a paper trail for every gun – the same trail that police departments in Connecticut and New York are trying to use to confiscate firearms. 

As to her opposing a background check for “assault weapons?”  That was a proposal that would have added a second,  utterly redundant background check for buying such weapons. 

Stout made the right call in all three cases – if “following the law and the Constitution” is what you care about, which for the Democrat party it is not. 

Taking those stances, in favor of the law-abiding citizens’ civil liberties, and turning them into “support for rape and domestic abuse?”

If you’re a DFL official, you might want to steer clear of me today. 

And if you voted for Peter Fischer over this ad?   Sorry for all the two-syllable words.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking through the woods in Como Park, looking for a place to practice the bagpipes.

Suddenly, Avery LIBRELLE jumps out from behind a tree. 

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  Your sides has been owned again!

BERG:  Er, Avery?  What are you doing in the middle of the woods?

LIBRELLE: Stakeout for climate criminals.  So anyway, we were talking about how your side has been owned again.

BERG:  “We” weren’t.  You were. 

LIBRELLE:  Hahaha.  And it comes from Canada.  Here.  Read it. 

LIBRELLE: So yet again, a Canadian proves he knows what’s best for us better than the American electorate does. 

BERG:  Well, no.  He’s shown he’s absorbed Deb Wasserman-Drescher’s chanting points like a Macalester College poli-sci grad.  Pretty much every point Richard Brunt of Victoria British Columbia says is wrong. 

LIBRELLE:  No way!

BERG:  Way.  Corporate profits are high because companies are sitting on cash, rather than investing.  The “under 6%” unemployment number is a sham; the percentage of people in the workforce who are working is essentially unchanged since the lowest point in the depression.  The GDP growth rate Mr. Brunt is bragging about is the slowest of any recovery in the post-war era. This is especially noteworthy because, normally, steep sharp recessions have steep, sharp recoveries (see 1982). This one was a steep recession with a painfully-slow recovery. How painful? The current GDP growth is equal to the WORST quarter of growth in the recovery from the 1982 recession.

Gasoline prices are “falling” to about $1 more than they were when Obama took office. Worse than that when you adjust for inflation. 

LIBRELLE:  Hah, Merg!  There is no inflation!

BERG:  Does you or Mr. Brunt ever buy bread, beef, chicken, eggs or health insurance?  …? CPI shows low inflation, but that’s largely a function of the price of debt – which is being kept artificially low:

Oh, yeah – and oil imports are declining partly due to the slow economy, and partly due to drilling in the Dakotas, which is basically happening over Obama’s, let’s just say, passive-aggressive objection.

As to the “respected around the world” bit? That’s just delusional.

LIBRELLE:  That’s just like a typical Repblicon.  A message based on fear!

BERG:  Fear?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah.  Fear of black people!

BERG:  How did fear or black people enter the conversation?

LIBRELLE:  You’re afraid, aren’t you?  Boo!  There’s a black guy sneaking up on you!

(BERG turns, inflates the bag on his pipes, and starts playing random noises to drown LIBRELLE out as he walks back to his car).

To:  New GOP Majorities in the MN House and US Congress
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Agenda

All,

Want something to show you’re serious about getting the boot of government off of innocent citizens’ necks? 

Reform civil-forfeiture laws.  Now. 

Including, preferably, eradicating laws that allow corrupt pettifoggers to run rackets with the blessing of “the law”. 

Do it now, so we can see who the real enemies are. 

That is all.