President BHO enlisted the support of our forefathers against their will in his 4th of July radio address.

He said the same “unyielding spirit” that drove the pioneers and Depression-era workers was needed now to push for a national health care overhaul, make major energy policy changes, and deal with a struggling economy, he said in his weekly address.

“We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it,” he said. “And on this July 4th, we need to summon that spirit once more. We need to summon the same spirit that inhabited Independence Hall two hundred and thirty-three years ago today.”

Yeah, I am pretty sure our forefathers, having fled tyranny, taxation without representation, and the plundering and ravaging of Great Britain were thinking big government, a huge national debt, unfair and burdensome tax codes, an administration seeking to usurp “checks and balances,” post-modern moral relativity, and “dialogue” with the enemies of freedom and human rights. That’s not what drove them to endure the hardships of an oceanic voyage and a revolutionary war.

That is the spirit we are called to show once more. We are facing an array of challenges on a scale unseen in our time. We are waging two wars. We are battling a deep recession. And our economy – and our nation itself – are endangered by festering problems we have kicked down the road for far too long: spiraling health care costs; inadequate schools; and a dependence on foreign oil.

Meeting these extraordinary challenges will require an extraordinary effort on the part of every American. And that is an effort we cannot defer any longer.

…so let’s borrow 800 Billion Dollars. If that’s not a deferral, I don’t know what is. Oh, and not every American. Just the 40% or so that actually pay taxes. True to form, there is no mention of the federal government’s part in our current malaise.

Now is the time to reform an unsustainable health care system that is imposing crushing costs on families, businesses, large and small, and state and federal budgets. We need to protect what works, fix what’s broken, and bring down costs for all Americans. No more talk. (No more talk? Then what do we need Obama for?-JR) No more delay. Health care reform must happen this year.

…because dagnabbit, only 80% of Americans are satisfied with the current system.

One can imagine the disgust John F. Kennedy (“Ask not…”) would have, let alone our forefathers, if they could see rugged individualism replaced by a nanny state, the enabling of bad personal decisions, the welfare rolls both individually and coporate, IOU’s issued by states, the US Federal Government  becoming one of the largest employers in the world, the interpretation or utter disregard for our Constitution by our courts; and more recently what the Obama administration and our liberal congress have proposed in the name of “Progress” in America.

They might have stayed home.

Patt Morrison at the LATimes talks with Karen Bass, Speaker of the California House of Representatives,  and a key player in California’s current fiscal meltdown.

And she does it by beating conservatives with a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, of which more in a bit:

How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?

The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.

So you caught that?  Dissent isn’t merely unpatriotic – it’s “terrorist”.

Which is, naturally, the way lefties are going to play it in the future.  It’s straight out of Alinsky:   Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.”

“Sticking to ones’ conservative principles and asking your elected legislators to do the same” equals “terrorism”.  It’s nonsense, it’s irresponsible – but it does pick, freeze, personalize and polarize.

I don’t know when Karen Bass had time to read Josef Goebbels, what with flushing California’s future down the toilet, but the jackboots look divine, don’t they?

This is politics in the age of Obama.

Thanks, lefties.

Remember when dissent was the highest civic virtue?

That is, naturally and inevitably, what happens when Republicans are in office.

But dissent an anti-scientific socialist power grab?

Treason!

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

I’m only being mildly hyperbolic when I wonder if we’ll see show trials by 2016, should Obama  win another term.

I don’t remember this garnering a lot of attention on the part of the media or blogosphere when in January the legislature passed a sin tax (although they won’t call it that) to curb the excessive use of yet another damaging substance:

Water.

Before approving the higher rates this year, Minnetonka City Council Members Brad Wiersum and Tony Wagner wanted to know whether the change to graduated fees was showing signs of working.

“Have we changed behavior or have we raised revenue?” Wiersum asked.

In the first year, “We changed behavior slightly, but not to any significance,” Wagstrom said.

Personally, I think watering your lawn and treating it with chemicals is silly and wasteful, especially in Minnesota where it will be frozen to death a few weeks after you have achieved green carpet nirvana. My opinion notwithstanding, municipalities should charge residents what it costs to deliver clean, safe water.

…and not a penny more.

In the past, if we’ve had a shortage, cities have relied on watering bans or odd/even day restrictions.

…but that doesn’t raise any more revenue now does it? And in the end, people that use more already pay more.

The sin tax on water is yet another violation of the principal of “government for the people;” another attempt to raise revenue and increase government influence under the guise of a crisis.

Its easy for the rest of America to disassociate with the fiscal crisis in California. After all, it represents a bigger-than-life culture of Hollywood, celebrities, extreme lifestyles and a Bush-era “conservative” Guvernator. Even more so in Minnesota where our culture and demographics make us an unlikely analog.

Nonetheless, we are subject to national policies now mirroring those of California and to think the results will somehow be different on an national scale is a predictable exercise of liberal insanity.

California, too, spent lavishly in the fat years and issued bonds when state revenues did not cover the costs, bringing its once-sterling credit rating down to the nation’s lowest. So, too, U.S. Treasury bonds, T-bills and the American dollar are now increasingly suspect.

California, like Minnesota has a mandatory budget-balancing provision in force and watching California comply is going to be a lesson in fiscal responsibility – the hard way.

with the state under a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, yet facing a $24 billion deficit this July, a chainsaw is about to be taken to state government.

At arms length (a 2000-mile arm that is), California’s issues hold little import for Minnesotans, and probably won’t have an immediate effect on us here. We should count ourselves fortunate that our Governor is willing to take the heat by refusing to hike taxes and un-allotting what our legislature wouldn’t un-budget. What is troubling is California’s microcosmic prognostication for the rest of the country.

California and it’s economy are faced with the fallout of massive over-spending, immigration, health care and arbitrary and burdensome emissions regulations – which have failed by the way. Sound familiar?

Some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation’s best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement.

The Obama administration represents the worst of fiscal liberalism as evidenced by the climate bill passed by the House, massive bailouts and a stimulus package that is nothing more than a veiled attempt to enlarge the federal government. Obama is making all the wrong moves, belying the lesson California’s fiscal train wreck offers the rest of us, and deservedly drawing comparisons to Jimmy Carter.

Under George W. Bush and Obama, the U.S. government has undertaken huge new responsibilities: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the takeovers of banks and auto companies, bailouts without end and national health insurance.

The “We Inherited it from Bush” plea will provide little cover as the Obama administration and virtually the same Congress that was in place during much of the Bush administration continue to ignore the signs. In six months they have done more damage to our nation’s solvency than Bush and Company did in eight years.

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan carried California nine times. But the state is now a fiefdom of liberalism. John McCain’s share of the vote was smaller than Barry Goldwater’s. California today believes in Big Government, open borders, diversity, multiculturalism and the politics of compassion. But what liberalism has wrought in California, its native-born are fleeing.

The rest of us have nowhere to flee. We can’t all move to Florida.

Does anyone know of a way to send financial help to the dissidents in Iran?  Back in 1980, Solidarnosc took donations (and I got one of the cool T-shirts out of the deal).

Anything like that today?

Joe Biden opens his mouth and out comes humor, drivel or drool.

“Everyone guessed wrong,” Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday, on the impact of stimulus legislation.

Not everyone. And by the way, they weren’t guessing – they were siezing an opportunity to not unwaste a crisis and transport America quickly to the left under the cover fire of Obama’s Doom and Gloom speech.

Some 330 economists signed a statement last winter saying that President Obama’s claim — that “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy” — simply “is not true.”

The economists were not crackpots but respected scholars, including Nobelists James Buchanan, Vernon Smith and Edward Prescott, as well as Reagan Office and Management of Budget Director James Miller, Walter Williams and John Lott.

Also opposed to the stimulus are the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and a core of U.S. representatives and senators, too small unfortunately to change the outcome, who saw through the smoke and weren’t fooled by the mirrors.

The result is now a soon-to-be total debt per American household of several hundred thousand dollars, the result of which will soon weigh heavily on the shoulders of liberal Democrats and our facist President when Republicans ask in 2012 “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

Posited in advance:  to paraphrase Scott Glenn’s “Bart Mancuso” Fred Thompson’s “Admiral Painter” from Hunt for Red October, bureaucracies don’t take a dump without someone writing down a policy beforehand.  Bureaucrats that try to tend to get in trouble.

Background: Early (earlier?) in the Obama Administration the Department of Homeland Security drew immense – and utterly justified – scrutiny for compiling a list of “extremists” and “potential terrorists” that, oddly, included just about everyone in the US that wasn’t a likely Obama constituent?

And remember how the left assures us that Obama, pinkie swear, doesn’t support gun control?

A number of MOB blogs got this email, from a longtime friend of the MOB.  Derek at Freedom Dogs wrote it up first:

I wanted to switch gears and mention a note I got from a friend last night about vets and concealed carry, or simply carry permits as they are known here in Minnesota. This was on my mind because just yesterday, I went down to the Hennipen County Sherrif’s office to apply for a permit along with a friend of mine who took the carry permit course with me. Simple process really and we should recieve them in about 30 days.Here is the note I got from a friend who I trust. If you are a vet, you are under the lens of scrutiny but don’t be “stressed” about it:

I had a doctors appointment at the local VA clinic yesterday and found something very interesting.

I would like to pass along.. While going through triage before seeing the doctor, I was asked at the end of the exam, three questions.

(1. Did I feel stressed?)

(2. Did I feel threatened?)

(3. Did I feel like doing harm to someone?)

The nurse then informed me, if I had answered yes to any of the questions, I could have lost my concealed carry permit as it would have gone into my medical records and the VA would have reported it to Homeland Security.

I am a Viet Nam vet and 15 year cc permit holder. Looks like they are going after us vets.”

Be forewarned and be aware. If you know veterans, you may want to pass this on to them.

So pass it around.

Remember – in Minnesota (and most Shall-Issue states), the sheriff has to find an affirmative reason, defensible (in Minnesota) in court, to reject your permit application or renewal.  And the key reasons come from government databases.  And if the government is actively trying to set peoples’ “caution” flags to give more governments more reasons to justify denying more permits…

I’ll be calling the VA to try to get to the bottom of this.

And if you’re a veteran who’s answered this question, I’d love to know if the potential consequences are being consistently explained to people.  I’ll be checking with the VA on that, too.

Methinks “No” isn’t the answer the Strib was looking for.

Instant Poll: Is the Shubert Theater project a good use of stimulus funds?

CAFE standards and the UAW hobbled the US auto industry…Barack Obama is here to finish the job.

A select few Conservatives and even fewer media pundits have labeled the takeover and bailouts of several American corporate icons as Socialism manifest.

The first months of the Obama Administration have given rise to abundant talk about a U.S. drift into socialism. “We Are All Socialists Now,” a Newsweek cover declared in February. On May 20 the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling on Democrats to “stop pushing our country toward socialism.”

Socialists in America say however that it isn’t so.

They say if the Obama Administration were establishing a true socialist state, we’d have at least a $15-an-hour minimum wage (instead of the current $6.55 federal minimum) and 30-hour workweeks. Every American would be guaranteed employment and health-care coverage. Oh, and homeless people would be occupying vacant office buildings in cities and vacant McMansions in the suburbs.

…as if Socialism exists on one side of a hash line but not on the other.

So apparently we’re not there yet.

Guaranteed employment, health-care and housing will come in Obama’s reelection campaign.

But that’s not really the point, is it?

Conservative Americans concerned for our future as a nation, as an economic power, fear the direction our country is headed and even more the lack of concern among our citizenry for what is quickly happening right under their noses. You can’t unbake a cake and so it is with big government and entitlements.

As our esteemed governor knows, reductions in either are historically very hard to come by. As the saying goes, a luxury becomes a necessity twenty four hours later not unlike new layers of government spending and regulation. Once in place, they tend to stay in place.

Socialists say the policies Obama has pursued are hallmarks of “democratic capitalist” states, not socialist ones. “None of the societies of Western Europe are socialist, but the political influence of their strong Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties make their form of capitalism much more humane than our own,” says Frank Llewellyn, national director of the New York-based Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest U.S. Socialist party.

I don’t know how “humane” delaying the inevitable was to UAW workers at GM; thousands of which are soon to lose their jobs as GM declares bankruptcy under the weight of years of artificially-high labor costs and government over-regulation, despite an infusion of billions of taxpayer dollars and an inept CEO being fired by an even more inept President.

In the end, auto workers will discover their rightful economic value hard and fast. Taxpayers will own 70% of a corporation that should have been absorbed by the system. Capitalism should have been allowed to do what capitalism does – efficiently redistribute capital and talent to it’s highest and best use.

Something quite opposite capitalism has instead been deliberately and opportunistically brought to bear. Call it Socialism or Obamunism – labels don’t matter – the point is our government is violating domain it has historically been denied (and in many cases by law is prohibited) to venture.

Socialists say…the Obama team is…scrambling to rescue and preserve capitalism.

Deflection. Nice try. Capitalism can take care of itself, thank you very much.

If Socialism were to come to America, would it come quick like a thief in the night…or real…slow…like…so as to stay under the radar; take capitalism by surprise?

How do you cook a frog? In a pot of cool water; turn up the heat real slow.

By the time he realizes he’s cooked, it’s too late to jump out.

A commentator at Pravda says that Marxism has finally triumphed – right here in the USA:

The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.

The irony – a Russian chattering about people giving up their freedom, practically a Great Russian genetic trait – only partly counterbalances the fact that he’s got a point.

If someone were to develop an education system to create a generations-deep supply of ignorant, impotent sheeple, how would they actually change our system?

Apparently, it involves writing endless spurious “ethics” complaints against Republicans – especially uppity women and minorities.

They’re running 0 and 13 against Sarah Palin, but then they were only meant to have shelf-life until the first Tuesday of last November, now, weren’t they?

Michael Geraghty, investigator for the State Personnel Board, concluded that there is no need for a hearing on the complaint filed in March by Andree McLeod, who has been a vocal critic of the governor since being denied employment with the state last year.This is the 13th ethics complaint against the governor or her staff that has been resolved with no finding of a violation of the executive ethics act. A few more are pending.

“While the complaint process under the ethics act can be a useful tool for holding state officials accountable, it’s obvious that political opponents of the governor have been abusing the system, attempting to turn their resentments into legal issues,” said Bill McAllister, the governor’s communications director. “We’re grateful that the personnel board and its investigators have taken a rational approach to these matters, finding that the vast majority of the complaints did not even warrant the collection of evidence because they failed to assert any violation of the law.”

But it gave them a shrieking point – “Governor Palin is under investigation!” – to sway the ill-informed and gullible during the campaign.

And that’s all the really matters, isn’t it?

When it comes to writing about the overweening nannystate, some posts write themselves.

For example – reading this story, it was almost impossible to resist referring to “Fashion Police” in the headline:

The “Too Much Bling? Give Us a Ring” campaign is the latest initiative by Gloucestershire police to lower the crime rate by cracking down on criminals who live in the lap of luxury as result of their crimes, the Daily Mail reported.

The police also urge residents to report anyone seemingly driving cars or buying items they shouldn’t be able to afford amid a credit crunch.

“In the current time of financial uncertainty, those who live a lavish lifestyle with no discernable, legitimate income become even more apparent,” Gloucestershire’s Chief constable Dr. Timothy Brain told the Mail.

Out-of-control leftism depends on turning citizens against each other – essentially deputizing all of us to become little junior spies, checking up on each other for the government.  And of course, having us all know that our neighbors are checking up on us, lest we forget.

In the wake of last night’s blasphemous-but-hilarious South Park, George Will’s piece on Obama’s emerging authoritarianism on the economy is perfectly-timed.

…the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler’s secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims — and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors’ contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

That’d be some of the “change” for which some of President Obama’s supporters had “hope”; the law no longer means what it says it means.

Among Chrysler’s lenders, some servile banks that are now dependent on the administration for capital infusions tugged their forelocks and agreed. Some hedge funds among Chrysler’s lenders that are not dependent were vilified by the president because they dared to resist his demand that they violate their fiduciary duties to their investors, who include individuals and institutional pension funds.

Not only trampling the law himself, but demanding that the hedge fund managers do the same?  In for a penny, in for a buck, I guess.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort — burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. — but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

It’s appropriate that President Obama is paying homage to the last president who was more demigogic legend than fact.

I’ll add emphasis on the home stretch:

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

The arrogant abuse of government power to ignore laws and manipulate the economy?

Finally, a problem the Administration can’t blame on the previous one…

Americans that lived through The Great Recession of “Ought Nine” will not soon forget the lessons learned and in fact US savings rates are up; consumer debt has fallen like a rock.

In the end, history will point an impeaching finger at liberals whose “high-mindedness” led to the most catastrophic and costly financial crisis in American history.

And yet…

Grants of as much as [$16,000] to first-time buyers and the lowest interest rates in 49 years have emboldened more than 40,000 young [home buyers] to take out home loans since October, stoking demand for properties that cost less than [$385,000].

These buyers may be vulnerable when interest rates begin rising, potentially triggering a jump in foreclosures that will drive down property prices, cut profits at banks and damp household spending, which accounts for half the economy. A surge in defaults in America was a key trigger for the financial crisis that pushed the global economy into its worst recession since World War II.

History repeats itself indeed, only this is in Australia, where the toilet swirls the other way and lessons are apparently learned the hard way.

“We’re mirroring what happened to the U.S. three years ago, when people who shouldn’t have been in the market bought houses,” said Martin North, managing director of Fujitsu Australia, a Sydney-based property-consulting company. “It’s a strategy set for an unfortunate outcome.”

G’Luck, mate!

Last week, Webster School in Saint Paul voted to change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.

Do I roll my eyes and shake my head when my local school district subscribes to a personality cult for a president that’s been in office just a skosh over three months?  Of course.  Indeed, it strikes me as the kind of second-hand hubris (I don’t know a better term for “participating in others’ hubris”) that I can see people looking back on in, say, five years, shaking their heads, and saying “well, maybe we were a bit rash…”

But the real problem is  Ain this thread, on E-“Democracy’s” Saint Paul forum.  Saint Paul school board member Ann Carroll chimes in later in the conversation:

Now just hold on here a minute! Some of the posts on this topic are veering
way too close to racist comments, which is not tolerated on either this
Issues Forum or by SPPS.

“Racist comments?”

Read the thread.  Before Carroll chimed in, one commenter (Gary Fishbach, friend of this blog and a noted Highland Park Republican) dropped a couple of pleas for fiscal sanity.  A couple of DFLers responded.

And then Carroll cried “Racism”.

You’ll examine the thread, as I did, in vain for the faintest sign of racism…

…unless you believe, as Carroll seems to, that criticizing the name change, for any reason, is itself racist.

I’ll be asking Ann Carroll for comment.

The name change is just plain dumb – although not, perhaps, as disturbing as the curriculum change.  “Service Learning” is education establishment shorthand for “shanghaiing students into serving as free labor for non-profits”. Like so much that passes for normal in the Saint Paul and Minneapolis public schools, it’s got very little to do with education, but much with paying chits to the educational establishment’s supporters, and making sure future generations get healthy doses of koolaid at an early age.

Sending jets over an apparently still-hinky-about-lowflying-airplanes Manhattan?

Tone deaf.

An administration official says a presidential Boeing 747 and a fighter jet flew low near ground zero in New York City Monday because the White House Military Office wanted to update its file photo of the president’s plane near the Statue of Liberty.

Sending the most expensive to build-and-run jet in the world (and a military escort plane,itself not cheap) out for what amounts to a flying Glamor Shot…:

This official said the White House Military Office told the Federal Aviation Administration that it periodically updates file photos of Air Force One near national landmarks, like the statute in New York harbor and the Grand Canyon.

…in the middle of an economic downturn?

Tone duh-f.

I mean, the Sorosphere has all sortsof Photoshop “geniuses”, right?

Hugh Hewitt on Obama’s urge to conduct a purge:

There is no serious prosecutor who would bring a charge against any of these Bush Adminstration officials. No one not from the far left side of the political spectrum can even frame the indictment or explain how the tactics less coercive than water-boarding could be considered criminal when Congress, offered the opportunity to declare water boarding a crime, refused to do so. When the left turns up a former United States Attorney or even senior prosecutor not named Ramsey Clark willing to lay out his theory of prosecution, that will be an argument worth responding to. This is a witch hunt, a political prosecution, one that should be a central issue in the campaigns of 2010.

I almost hope Obama goes ahead with it. It’d make the McCarthy years look like traffic court.

Via Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring, GOP State Rep Steve Gottwalt  blows the whistle on some gratuitous DFL overreach:

ST. PAUL – State Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, said he is shocked by the number of anti-business bills being pushed by the [DFL] House majority this session. With Minnesota facing a $6.4 billion budget deficit, Gottwalt said the best thing the Legislature could do this session is help more residents find work.

“Besides solving our budget deficit, the most important task lawmakers have this session is to approve policies that help retain and create jobs,” Gottwalt said. “Instead, Minnesota House Democrats are repeatedly proposing job killing tax increases.”

Gross follows up with a question for the DFL – especially DFL rep. Tom Bakk, who’s been leading the “tax ’em til they drop” faction of the DFL: 

I just posted a criticism of the Senate DFL’s job-killing tax increases. At the heart of that post is this question for Tom Bakk: If people are willing to travel across the Minnesota-Wisconsin border to save $20 in liquor taxes, why does Sen. Bakk think that a small business wouldn’t move across the Minnesota-South Dakota border to save $50,000 a year in in come taxes?

Short of building a wall with minefields and dogs to prevent escape, y’mean?

Oops.  I should erase that last bit. I  know DFLers who read this blog…

Gottwalt lists some examples of, er, gross DFL overreach:

Gottwalt listed several House proposals that could significantly hamper the way employers conduct business:

● HF 2031, which prohibits Minnesota from purchasing products from the Willmar-based Jennie-O Turkey Store at the request of unions. Gottwalt said if Democrats succeed in blacklisting this Minnesota business, there would be nothing stopping them from going after any business at the request of unions or other special interests.

While I’m not anti-union by any means – unlike most DFLers, I’ve been in a union – this is the kind of thing that needs to be jumped on with heavy boots.  When unions start using the power of government to get their payback, society is screwed.  This is the sort of thing that dragged the British economy into the toilet in the ’60s and ’70s. 

● HF 644, which sets mandates on companies with city contracts, regulating who they must hire, but exempting union labor contracts.

Ditto.

Gross:

Gottwalt added that the real job killer is the $4.4 billion tax increase proposed by House Democrats. That includes a new income tax bracket. The new 9-percent bracket would place Minnesota among the nation’s highest income taxes.

“Keep in mind 92 percent of small businesses in Minnesota pay taxes through personal income taxes, meaning that any income tax increase will directly hurt our small employers and economic recovery,” Gottwalt said.

So what we have here is the DFL paying back its markers to the unions, serving as a thuggish enforcer for their wishes.

(And wouldn’t a law that singles out a specific company for non-criminal reasons take a big steaming dump on the Fourteenth Amendment?)

Keep it going, DFL.  You’re making this whole “opposition pundit” thing easier and easier. 

Greg Gutfeld catalogues the racism, hatred and rage [links to video] at the Tea Parties.

Garafolo, Napolitano and Coopero are onto something here.

Yesterday President Obama released Bush administration memos on terrorist interrogation techniques in the interest of transparency and with a blatant disregard for national security.

Clearly, as unsavory as some of these techniques must be (I don’t want to know how sausage is made either) we have been kept safe here at home for some time since 9/11 and there have been several foiled attempts at savagery on the part of terrorists in Western nations – without a doubt in part due to our more aggressive attempts to gather, intercept intelligence and connect the dots to protect our interests – and save lives.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”

Whatever happened to when in doubt, keep your mouth shut – or in this case, keep the file cabinet locked. Whatta ya say Obammy that we err on the side of maintaining national security, not eroding it? Is that too much to ask?

What possible purpose could be served by advertising our most top-secret techniques for gleaning information that has probably saved lives?

A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It’s damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama’s action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake.”

“I don’t believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”

This should come as no surprise to those of us who warned you that a man that “served” in public office for less than two years is not a suitable choice to lead this nation. But disregard the Incompetence Theory^™ for now. Is it possible that Barack Obama holds his liberal agenda above all else, without regard for the consequences to our nation or it’s people?

Preposterous you say? Case in point: an $800 Billion stimulus package that will only raise our nation’s already untenable debt, devalue our dollar, and with no hope or precedent to show that such a plan has any hope of stimulating anything – save half our nation’s Hopey Changey dreams of a world without pain – or gain.

Not to mention the fact that our economy is showing signs of stabilization – and without any assistance from the not-yet-implemented “stimulus.”

And why release this now – are all other issues solved? Does Obama know that we are now somehow immune from attack?

Obama did not act on an arbitrary timeline. There was a deadline in a court case with the ACLU on Thursday. It had been extended, but the ACLU was not going to agree to another.

Ah, the ACLU. Well at least now we know who’s in charge.

Or, is this Barack Obtumor’s way of relieving the non-existent guilt of a nation not-sorry for having the audacity to protect it’s law-abiding citizens from being deep-fried in jet fuel in his or her 88th-floor office?

No, it’s a sophomoric President force-feeding an ever-angering nation a far-far-left (we warned you) agenda that flies in the face of his promise of Change^®.

…and leaves us a little less safe than we were on Wednesday.

So let’s break it down:

1. Large group of Americans gather to protest taxes, spending and a rapacious government.
2. Leftymedia large, small and anonymous embarks on concerted effort to paint protesters as “extremists” and “radicals” (when not tittering like a bunch of seventh-graders), spending hours and pages of media time and space attacking protests that, let us not forget, don’t matter.
3. DHS releases a report that depicts pretty much every American to the right of Arne Carlson as a slavering Bircher.

Coincidence?

I was at a seance the other day, and we heard from – I kid you not – Joe McCarthy.

Here was the gyst of things:

MEDIUM: “OoooooooOOOOOOoooooh…”

McCARTHY: “Hello.  This is Joe McCarthy from the great beyond.  Keith Moon says “hi”. Anyway – please get word to Janet Napolitano; “Thanks”.  In five years, “Napolitanism” will have pushed “McCarthyism” out of the public perception.

Ms. Napolitano; I owe you my posterity.

MEDIUM: “OoooOOOOooooOOOOOooooh”.

It was kinda spooky.  He sounded happy, though.  Like his spirit was…

…getting cosmic payback?

Anyway.

To: Janet Napolitano, DHS Secretary

From: Mitch Berg, Right Wing Extremist

Re: Assess This.

Secretary Napolitano,

I heard your response to American Legion president Rehbein’s criticism of your agency’s report.

Your line (as heard on NPR this morning): “It’s an assessment, not an accusation”.

With all due respect (emphasis on “due”), Secretary Napolitano, that’s a warehouse full of baked wind.

An “assessment”, well, assesses.  It quantifies, or at least qualifies, something; in the case of a “risk assessment”, it is supposed to give the “why” as well as the “who”.

But as John Hinderaker pointed out in skewering the report earlier this week, your report doesn’t “assess” anything; it runs down a shopping list of conservative groups, without explaining why any of them are a risk; no incidents, no people, no specifics, merely “watch out for pro-lifers, NRA members, tax protesters, and veterans; they’re all prone to being recruited by all those scary “militia” groups!”

That’s not an “assessment”; it’s a mass drive-by smear, no less so than “assessing” that black men are “prone” to being lazy, that Mexicans are “liable” to be illegals and that women are “likely” to be slaves to emotion to the point that they can’t be trusted with anything important.
If everyone’s a (potential) extremist, then nobody’s an extremist. Unless your only goal is to define “dissent” as “extreme”, “dangerous” or “mentally ill”.

Which, to be fair, seems to be not unthinkable with the Obama Administration; anyone who’d say “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and…it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” probably isn’t a stranger to the notion that “dissent is derangement”.

Which was more a Soviet thing than an American one, at least heretofore.

So, with all due (heh) respect, Secretary Napolitano, “assess” this:

Thanks, and do have a nice day.

That is all.