I was driving north on 35E yesterday afternoon, when I saw there was no traffic on the southbound side coming out of Saint Paul.

Then came about 10 cop cars, whoopie lights a-blazin’.

Then the Presidential limo.

Then about a dozen or two other SUVs, limos, an ambulance, and cop cars.

Then I turned up Ayd Mill Road – a tributary arterial road that’s sort of a hidden four-lane freeway through the middle of Merriam Park, Crocus Hill and Highland before connecting to 35E – and saw traffic backed up from 35 almost all the way back to Hamline. That’s about two miles.

This being Saint Paul, I figured most of them probably voted for him, and it served them right.

The “Obama Recovery” still isn’t. 

The U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 2.9 percent during the first three months of 2014, government bean counters announced this morning. That matches the worst non-recession contraction of the U.S. economy in over 40 years.

Perhaps, taking a cue from minimum wage hike laws, the Administration could issue a decree for everyone to build, spend and borrow more?
 

Why do Democrats yap so much about the “Koch Brothers”?

Because Berg’s Seventh Law is absolute and irrefutable, that’s why.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

At least one federal government program is shutting down.

President Obama is quietly releasing terrorists.  First the Taliban Five from Gitmo, now a dozen more in Pakistan.

 Joe Doakes

Maybe there were rehabilitated?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember a couple of months ago, when President Obama was on his Far East World Adulation Tour, he promised Japan and the Philippines that the good old US of A would be their big brother against mean old China?

Considering he can’t even manage to abandon Iraq without dithering about pulling troops and then sending them back in again . . . do you think the Prime Ministers of our new allies are feeling all warm and fuzzy about Barak Hussein Obama having their backs?

Joe Doakes

I’m guessing that whole “contain the Japanese military” thing is eroding fast these days.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

California students sued, claiming teacher tenure laws were unconstitutional.

“The students argued that they had terrible teachers who were nearly impossible to fire and who kept them from getting good educations.”

Students won in California.  They’re talking about bringing an action in other states, including Minnesota.  Can’t wait.

Joe Doakes

One can hope.  But I have to think Education Minnesota has been more diligent about buying judges than California was…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The IRS official email retention and backup plan is even dumber than mine, and I don’t have one.

Joe Doakes

I wish I could have the two hours of my life back that I spent sitting in meetings for my current company’s record retention policy.

Courtest of, among others, the IRS.

Now the Administration is claiming that Lois Lerner’s hard drive was lost, destroyed or recycled, so her emails may be lost forever. 

I’m not a networking guy, but I still call BS.

Perhaps if…

• Lois Lerner’s hard drive
• Lerner’s work-group’s email server’s hard drive
• The RAID (large redundant hard-disk) array(s) and/or backup tape(s) to which Lerner’s work group email server backed up its emails
• Any of the number of tapes, and/or mirrors of RAID arrays, to which the emails had been backed up in the interest of “disaster recovery”…

…(in other words, the exact same level of backup to which any private entity would be required to adhere to by law, or face default judgment in the event of litigation, including (especially!) from the IRS, and the level of backup all levels of all serious business practice to make sure they can respond to legal action, to say nothing of things like, well, hard drives going bad)…

…had all been “lost, destroyed or recycled”, they’d have a point. 

Odds?

INCIDENTAL NOTE:  This post is #11,000 since November, 2006.  Apropos nothing.

In which we learn from our “President” that gun violence (which has dropped by half in the past twenty years) “has never been worse”, but that the world “has never been less violent” (as the Middle East spirals toward a general conflagration). 

Even Jimmy Carter knew better than to look at a bowl full of crap and call it organic sherbet.

But Jimmy Carter was targeting an electorate that was paying attention.  Obama never has.

One question I get from GOP activists, in the run-up and especially since the convention, is “Isn’t Mike McFadden anti-gun?”

Now, if the GOP’s endorsed Senate candidate has taken criticism for anything, it’s being a little enigmatic on some of his answers to policy questions.  That is, obviously, going to have to change soon.  And I suspect it will.

But if there’s one issue where McFadden’s been scrutinized pretty carefully, it’s guns.  And the fact is this:  McFadden supported the “gun show background check”.  And let’s be honest; a lot of people did, including a lot of pro-gun people who hadn’t thought through all the ramifications (it’d be a de facto gun registry).  And I’m going to guess it was an idea that tested out well in focus groups with mixed bags of voters who also didn’t know the issue all that well.

But then McFadden ran up against Minnesota’s shooters – the single best-organized mass of activists in Minnesota.  And the shooters howled.  And McFadden has spent the past three months walking back the gun-show registration idea.

Beyond that, McFadden had nothing objectionable to say (and yes, “what he says” is what we have to go by, since he has no voting record).

So I have two responses:

Flip?:  Has McFadden flipped on gun-show background checks?  Hopefully.  He’s certainly been vocal about not being anti-Second-Amendment at his speeches – it was pretty much the first item on the agenda of his speeches I heard in March and April.  I have no problem with people flipping, by the way, provided they flip in the right direction.  He rates some further scrutiny – gotta keep politicians honest – but I think we’ve got the basis for some optimism.

Perspective:  Let’s say for a moment that McFadden is generally pro-gun, with a few minor warts.  Now, I know “incrementalism” is a dirty word for some of you out there, but a Senator who generally supports the Second Amendment, even with a few flash-points of disagreement, will be an improvement at the national level over Al Franken, who only wants “Organizing for America” to be armed.

Discuss.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2008, Candidate Obama assured us the war in Iraq was the wrong war. He wanted to fight the right war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban.
In 2014, President Obama surrendered the Taliban high leadership back to the enemy and announced American troops will be leaving Afghanistan.
He picked the war. He lost it. His legacy.
Joe Doakes

Even those of us who tacitly agreed that Afghanistan needed the most emphasis have to be disappointed by Obama’s performance.

SCENE:  The office of the Governor of Minnesota.   Gathered around a table are:

• Carrie LUCKING, the Executive Director of Alida Messinger’s “Alliance for a Better Minnesota.  She is at the head of table.
• Bob HUME, the Governor’s chief of staff, sits at LUCKING’s right.
• Tina FLINT-SMITH, the governor’s other chief of staff, is at LUCKING’s left.
• Yvette PRETTNER-SOLON, the Lieutenant Governor, dozes at  far end of the table
• Hannah UNDERLING is standing by.

LUCKING:  In the name of Alita the Mother Almighty, I call this meeting to order!

HUME, FLINT-SMITH and UNDERLING:  All hail!

LUCKING:  So what have you discovered?

HUME:  Well, honey… (LUCKING fixes HUME with a withering glare) …er, sir, the Republicans are facing an unruly split in the Libertarian wing of the party. 

FLINT-SMITH:  We believe they can be wedged. 

LUCKING:  In the name of Mighty Alita (a speaker blares a thunder sound effect in the background, and UNDERLING flickers the light switch of and on a few times) make it so.

HUME:  We’ll pass the governor off as a Libertarian!

FLINT-SMITH:  I’ll put Baird Helgeson on it, over at the Strib.  Hannah?

UNDERLING:  Yes, ma’am?

FLINT-SMITH:  Issue an order to the Strib.  The Governor is now a libertarian. 

UNDERLING: By your leave. 

LUCKING:  What else?

HUME:  We have reason to believe that the GOP is going to make a move for Somali immigrants.  They even have a candidate, running against Phyllis Kahn. 

LUCKING:  We shall make the Governor Muslim.  His middle name is Faruq.   (Thunder effect, as UNDERLING flickers the lights).

FLINT-SMITH (gets up and walks to and opens the closet door).  Mark?

GOVERNOR MARK DAYTON (muffled, from inside closet):  Huh?

FLINT-SMITH: You’re Muslim now.

DAYTON: (thinly) OK. 

(FLINT-SMITH closes the door)

LUCKING:  Next?

HUME:  The GOP had their convention.  They endorsed several candidates, but several are going to the primary.

FLINT-SMITH:  AKA “The DFL Way” .

LUCKING:  Who are these people?

HUME (pulling out clipboard):  The first is the governor candidate, Jeff Johnson.

LUCKING (thinking deeply):  We shall issue a press release saying he is Wrong For Minnesota. 

FLINT-SMITH:  Hannah?  Get on it.  (UNDERLING takes a note)

HUME:  The next one is the Senate candidate, Mike McFadden.

LUCKING (thinking even deeper):  We shall issue a press release saying McFadden is…Wrong For Minnesota. 

(UNDERLING takes a note)

HUME:  Dan Severson is running for Secretary of State.

LUCKING (deep in thought):  I think that we need to tell Minnesotans that Severson is…

(silence.  HUME and FLINT-SMITH wait with bated breath, as UNDERLING scribbles on her notepad and PRETTNER-SOLON snores lightly)

LUCKING:  Severson is Wrong For Minnesota.  (nods her head as the others jot notes).

UNDERLING:  How about Arne Carlson?

LUCKING:  Arne Carlson is…Wrong for Minnesota as well.

UNDERLING:  He’s not actually on the ballot. 

LUCKING (looks confused for a moment.  Then focuses on UNDERLING):  You are Wrong for Minnesota. 

HUME:  I brought brownies. 

FLINT-SMITH (taking a brownie, takes a bite.  Grimaces):  Um…did you use salt, or sugar? 

HUME:  Dammit.  Not again…

LUCKING:  The brownies are Wrong For Minnesota. 

HUME:  Oh, by the way, Carrie?  I couldn’t get reservations at Crave tonight. 

LUCKING:  That’s Wrong for Minnesota!

(And SCENE)

Jonathan Turley:  Obama has become the president that a Nixon wanted to be – but never had the raw power to actually pull off:

What’s troubling is that we have a system that has been stable precisely because these are limited and shared powers. This president has indicated that he’s just not willing to comply with some of those aspects. He told Congress he would go it alone and in our system you’re not allowed to go it alone.

Nixon was ruthless at exercising power – but Obama has one thing Nixon could never dream of; a media that has taken it as a mission to serve as his praetorian guard.

Why were the DFL’s array of sock-puppets out in such force writing about the GOP convention?

To draw attention away from their own, up in Duluth.

First came reports that the DFL were denying media credentials to reporters from newspapers that had criticized Dayton.

Which is one way of silencing dissent.

Another way to silence dissent?  Agree not to talk about the inconvenient truth – that the DFL is intensely split on  mining.

That’s what the DFL did at their convention in Duluth over the weekend; looked at the upcoming bloodletting between their ultra-liberal, metro-area base – which is as dogmatic a pack of environmentalists as you will find in Democrat politics – and the Iron Range.

The Range, of course, is Minnesota’s red-headed economic stepchild; an area of the state whose economy has been draggy since the demise of the US steel industry forty years ago.

Of course, there is an immense wealth of minerals under the ground in Northern Minnesota, putting thousands of underemployed miners back to work, and creating jobs for many, many thousands more in the many areas that support mining – everything from mine equipment maintenance to truck driving to convenience stores catering to people going to and from work.

But currently – thanks to DFL-authored environmental rules and business regulations – it is literally better business to load ore-rich rock into trains and ship it to North Dakota than to build a processing plant in Minnesota.

So while the DFL had only one significant endorsement battle – to pick a Secretary of State candidate – the battle lines were in fact forming to duke out the battle between blue-collar Rangers and the businesses what want to hire them on the one side, and plutocrat Metro-area environmentalists (including Alita Messinger, who bankrolls Minnesota’s environmentalist messaging as completely as she controls the DFL’s).

And the DFL responded the same way Brave Sir Robin did:

In the end, activists on both sides came to the microphones to urge hundreds of feisty dele­gates to delay the vote indefinitely, a remarkable showing for a party that has seen conventions erupt into damaging fights with political scars that can last decades.

“I think people on both sides understand that we can have respectful differences, but we need to make sure we don’t do anything that is going to take away from our candidates’ ability to win this fall,” said Ken Martin, DFL Party chairman. “So there was a lot of discipline here. People understand the ramifications of the issue.”

Well, we certainly hope they do.

Because those ramifications were:

• To shut everyone up so that…
• …the same pack of Metro-DFL hamsters that have been working to keep Rangers unemployed and on the dole can get re-elected in what should be a tough year for them.

In other words, “Just two more years, Rangers, and we’ll think about it.  Or four.  Or eight.  We’ll get back to you…”

And hopefully it’ll get tougher for the DFL.  Stewart Mills has a genuine shot at sending Rick Nolan packing over this very issue.  More than that?

Think about it, Iron Range.  This isn’t your grandfather’s DFL.  The DFL is controlled by Metro-area poshes who haven’t dug for anything but grad-school grants in their lives.  They hate your guns and hunting and outdoor life.  They hate your largely pro-life beliefs.  And above all, they hate what you and the generations before you try to do for a living.  You, Ranger, are to the Metro DFL what the black or Latino family, or women, are; reliable votes in exchange for cheap lip service.

Money – jobs, in this case – talks.

Iron Rangers should know what walks.

It’s time for us to exercise our Christian charity (or Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or even Skeptic charity – I don’t care much) and help the Democrat party come up with a new slogan.

These are from yesterday’s nomination round:

Vote early, and vote once (which is all the code will allow)!

Polls close at midnight, if I remember to close them.

The Democrats are unveiling a new slogan, we’re told.

If they’re going for something zippy but that is still compliant with “truth in advertising” laws, I’d suggest:

Stay The Curse!

But I’m open to other suggestions.

We may have a poll on this later….

NOTE:  Nominations close at 5PM.  Going to the primary is not an option.

NOTE 2: Nominations are closed (because PollHost has a maximum of 20 entries…)!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2010, President Obama told NASA chief Charles Bolden that his foremost job was to: “ . . . find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” But last month, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said the agency’s primary focus is humans on Mars by 2035.

Is this another one of President Obama’s famous pivots?  Are we pivoting to Mars, now?

Joe Doakes

We’re lucky he hasn’t pushed an expedition to land on the Sun.

Mark Andrew is a former Henco commissioner and former DFL chair.  He also works in the “green energy marketing” biz.  Since “government” is the primary target of green industry “marketing”, it’s fair to say Andrew is part of our nation’s ongoing green graft racket – by which the “green” industry tries to chivvy tax money from friendly governments.

And as yesterday’s Strib op-ed shows, he really really doesn’t like the Koch Brothers – their refinery (the Flint Hills refinery in Rosemount), them, or their business:

What make’s their businesses so dirty is not just what they do, but how they do it.

Koch Industries’ corporate ethos is to pollute the American landscape with impunity.

(Really, Mark?  That’s their “ethos”?  The Kochs base their behavior on the idea that polluting is a moral good?  That seems a bit far-fetched).

After hours, they fuel a dark labyrinth of propoganda networks to spew out pollution of another kind-disinformation, defamation and denials. Their goal is not to gain market share–it is to rid the world of government oversight of their businesses and the nefarious groups that prop them up. This is how they roll.

Put another way – and in this case an accurate one?  The Kochs use some of their fortune (in the tens of billions) to press libertarian solutions (some of their stances have angered conservatives and would probably have gotten Andrew’s support, if he were intellectually honest, which this article pretty much confirms he’s not).

Oh, yeah – they’re thought-criminals (emphasis added):

The brothers over the years have outspent ExxonMobil’s subsidies of shadow climate denier groups by a 3-1 margin.

But this piece isn’t just an attack on the Kochs.

No – it’s against those polluted by association – in this case, the Ordway Theatre in Saint Paul, which the Koch Brothers help underwrite (again, emphasis added):

It is not so curious then, that the Koch’s would want to align themselves with St.Paul’s Ordway Theatre, one of the nation’s leading non-profit live performance venues. The 14th Annual “Flint Hills International Children’s Festival, presented by the Ordway” opens this weekend, and is the perfect halo under which the conglomerate might dwell for a few days, basking in the glow of delighted children whose lives are put at risk by their business and political actions.

The Koch’s [sic] and the Ordway’s that birthed the theatre couldn’t be a starker study in contrasts…Bathed in a riot of color, the brochure captures multi-colored children carefully photographed and captivated by a phantasmagoria of dance, music, acrobatics and reverie. And not a refinery to be found!

The stagings are fantasy adventures as far removed from daily reality as the Koch brothers’ climate change denials.

One wonders if the Kochs slither about in black capes and top-hats and laugh maniacally as they twirl their waxed mustaches.

What Andrew is trying to do is “shame” the Ordway – and the rest of Minnesota’s cultural community – into putting the Kochs “beyond the pale”.   Something like this:

Look for more of this; well-heeled liberals badgering Big Minnesota into dissociating with anyone who pushes back against Big Narrative.

Because to the Minnesota left, the only act that can be shamed any more is disagreeing with Big Left.

Epilogue:  A local journo pointed out on Facebook that Andrew’s op-ed reads a lot like Andrew’s former boss at the Minnesota Daily – Nick Coleman.

I toyed with responding on Facebook “A badly-written hatchet job, long on name-calling, thoughtcrime-shaming and innuendo and short on fact?  Yes, I see the similarity”.

But I don’t like it when people gunk up my Facebook page, either.   But it never ceases to amaze me – journalists actually think Nick Coleman is a good writer and reporter.

Real economic growth…didn’t exist in the first quarter:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property

located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to

the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP

increased 2.6 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for

the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, real GDP was estimated to have

increased 0.1 percent. With this second estimate for the first quarter, the decline in private inventory

investment was larger than previously estimated.

Some lefty pundits are blaming the “tough winter”.

I remember some tough winters in ’83-85.  The economy kept on recovering, somehow.  Perhaps shovel and snowblower factories and shoveling crews were hiring?

The real answer?  It goes beyond President Obama.  “Progressivism” destroys economies and lives.

Last week in the Strib, an op-ed by Will Stancil – described as “Will Stancil is a researcher at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota” – declared:

But in the Twin Cities, many of those grade-schoolers are sitting in segregated classrooms. Single-race schools have been making a comeback in Minnesota.

It’s the charter schools that are the problem. Charters are rapidly growing, but still controversial, with their effectiveness hotly debated. Despite that controversy, or perhaps because of it, a disturbing reality about charters is widely overlooked: Many boast student bodies that are entirely composed of members of one race.

Stancil concluded:

We can’t allow new ideas about education to erode civil rights progress…Charter advocates frequently insist on the need to close the equity gap and create opportunity for all students, no matter their race. But their commendable agenda cannot proceed in a segregated organization. As we celebrate Brown’s legacy, we should also remember its lessons: that integration is the grandfather of all equity issues and that racial separation is a root cause of American inequality…Charter schools should not allow themselves to become flagbearers for a divided system reminiscent of an uglier era.

I read it – and marked it down to address this week. 

But Bill Wilson – the first black Saint Paul City Councilman – and education activist Joe Nathan did it first, in the Strib, and did a fine job…

…in part by noting Stancil’s invocation of the “S” word was cheap, inflammatory and wrong (emphasis added):

Some critics don’t seem to understand the huge difference between forcing people, because of their race, to attend a school, and giving new options to people, especially those from low-income families and families of color.

This exposes the great divide in education – between:

1. the “public” mandate that uses the school system to send society a symbolic message (however good that message may be), and maybe “educate” the kids in the bargain
2. The “individual choice” model, which empowers families to, y’know, see to their kids’ education.

For many kids, school is hard enough without having to solve all the social problems their parents kicked down the road to them.  And so their families choose – choose! – schools that actually work, on the assumption that it’s better for their kids to compete on a more level intellectual playing field later than to serve as some bureaucrat’s statistical incentive today. 

Read the Wilson/Nathan piece.  Compare it with Stancil’s tone-deaf vapidity.

And then remember which party has always fought against school choice.

…how the media would treat a Republican lawmaker who’d accomplished less in 14 years than Betty McCollum?

“Empty Suit”?  “Waste of a Chair?”  I mean, just think of all the things they said about Rod Grams, who accomplished more in eight years than Saint Paul Wellstone did in 12.

But it’s Betty McCollum whose toenails the Strib’s Allison Sherry has been given the job to paint.  And so McCollum’s decades of indolence are described thus:

McCollum, an understated lawmaker who got her political start on the North St. Paul City Council,

She’s “understated”.

Hm.

After 14 years in office, her signature accomplishment?  Attacking National Guards advertisements at NASCAR events that cost less per year than building a block and a half of the Central Corridor train line and money pit that she tirelessly championed.  Less than an eighth of the money she helped dragoon the government into spending on the Union Depot.  Less than the proverbial fart in the wind compared with the Obamacare debacle she saddled us with (but can’t defend to save her life, without lying)?

Understated.

If a Democrat pushed someone off the High Bridge to their death, the media would describe the victim as “damp”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is an interesting set of questions.  Too bad there’s not a chance in Hell they’ll ever get straight answers.

Joe Doakes

We’re close enough to 2016 where I’m sure Obama figures he can run out the clock.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You don’t need to see our appointment logs to check VA wait times; we’ve carefully checked our records and confirmed we were right all along.   So that’s settled.

 

This is the level of investigative journalism that meets the standards of the MSM.  The VA said they don’t have secret lists, so they don’t.  Because if the VA had secret stuff they would say so.  You know, like secret surveillance of citizens, secret monitoring of phone calls of world leaders and Joe the Plumber.  Secret targeting of undesirable political opposition by the IRS, the INS, the EPA, the Dept of the Interior, etc.

 

If they had a secret, the responsible people in the government would fess up at once, without doubt.  Since they haven’t, there’s nothing to see here: move along.

Takes me back to the days when Obama ordered the oceans closed.  Yeah, remember, what, a year ago, he closed the ocean off Florida to punish the voters for the shut-down?  He does so much outrageous, blatantly illegal and stupid crap that you forgot about that one, didn’t you?

 

This is what Fernandez means by “dense pack.”  Obama has so many scandals occurring so quickly that we never get a chance to investigate one before it’s old news and we must move on to the next.  Thus, no scandal ever sticks to him.

It’s the equivalent of a lawyer answering a discovery motion by dumping triplicate copies of every piece of paper in their client’s office on the petitioner, in hopes that anything incriminating gets lost in the blizzard of paper.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President campaigned for re-election on the grounds that General Motors was alive but Osama Bin Laden was dead.

Except . . . if Global Warming threatens the very existence of human life on this planet, and autos cause Global Warming, shouldn’t he have let General Motors die?

And if Islamic Terror is merely a law enforcement nuisance, shouldn’t he have let Osama Bin Laden live?

Maybe he read the articles in the newspaper out of order and got confused?

Joe Doakes

Polar Bears don’t vote.

DPMS Arms is leaving St. Cloud and taking a slew of jobs with it.  The jobs are moving to Alabama to join a big gun conglom that is soaking up companies and jobs from gun-hostile states. 

Good work, Michael Paymar.  It was only Saint Cloud, right?