How many jobs a month do we have to add to bring the level of employment back to pre-recession levels?

How long will it take to get back to pre-recession employment at current – or any – rate of job “creation?”

Check it out for yourself!

Hint – at the current rate (169,000 a month, before adjustments), we’re ten years away.  Although the calculator doesn’t distinguish between full-time and part-time jobs – although under the Obama notion of “recovery” the same number of jobs doesn’t mean the same kind of prosperity.

More red lines that we have not the faintest will to stand behind.  Again.

Note to Foggy Bottom:  extremists don’t give mulligans.

If, as Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum wish, the Obama Administration drags us to war in Syria, the big victims will likely be the nation’s Alawites (Assad is an ethnic Alawite) and the nation’s beleaguered Christian minority.

Why do Betty “Blood and Guts” McCollum and Keith Ellison hate Christians and Alawites?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Now Investors Business Daily is claiming that while the IRS was holding up Conservative groups to make sure they didn’t actively campaign to get-out-the-Conservative-vote and thereby run afoul of tax laws, the IRS was also actively teaching Black groups how they could actively campaign to get-out-the-Black-vote without running afoul of the tax laws.

This isn’t the first time in history that the entrenched bureaucracy has chosen the new leader, but it’s not the Change I’d been Hoping for.

And where is the shock and outrage in the press? Uncaring? Or complicit?

hat tip: instapundit

J Doakes

I keep forgetting; does “just following orders” count as complicity?

Learn more about the reality of Common Core from “Minnesotans Against Common Core“.

And here’s the North Metro Tea Party.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m back in the studio after a couple of weeks at the State Fair.  I’ll be talking with Jake and Jack from the Tea Party.  Then I’ll have Lisa Zufall in the studio to talk about Common Core.  
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my new UStream video and chat channel (don’t ask)
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Unemployment down to 7.3% – almost entirely due to people leaving the workforce; the Labor Force participation rate is down to 63.2%, the lowest since the depths of the Carter Malaise. 

That means the percentage of the workforce actually working is down to 58.5864%. 

• When President Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, it was 60.58%
• In October of 2009, when the top-line unemployment rate was 10%, the rate was…58.5%.  Statistically the same as today, even though the “unemployment rate” has theoretically dropped by a quarter.
• At the bottom of the recession – December of 2010 – it was 58.2%. 
• A year ago, it was 58.36%.  It’s been in the 58% range ever since – a time when, NPR assures us, we’ve been “recovering”. 
• And ten years ago last month – as the economy was getting out of the DotBomb and 9/11 slowdowns, but before the mortgage bubble really inflated – it was 62.07%. 

America’s work force is still in full recession mode.

Democrats were pleased to call the recoveries of 2003 and 1983 “jobless recoveries”.  Especially if you’re one of the Afrian American voters who turned out for Obama twice now.

This one seems to be a “recoveryless recovery”.

…that if we voted for Mitt Romney, the government would push for war with Syria.

And they were right!

For the first time since before the 2008 election – actually, probably since 2006 – I re-read my 2004 series, “Secession Diaries“, the other day.

After the 2004 election, pouting lefties proposed allowing the blue states to secede and unite with Canada, creating two countries – the “United States of Canada”, the progressive blue/Canadian union, and “Jesusland”, the red states.

My series explored the results of a potential split.  And it was fictional.

Or…was it?

In rereading the series, I was a litte amazed at how many of my comic japes from nine years ago have actually come to pass.  Example:  in the story, a hurricane devastates the Mid-Atlantic.  Relief efforts are hampred by union goons ejecting non-union relief workers.  Fact or fiction?  Both!

I will submit it for your approval.  And partly to start my head churning for an update.

It’s almost a week old – but this is the most glorious smackdown of urban enviroweenies ever.

Of course, it’ll take more than a great op-ed; it’ll take defeating the DFL – since those enviroweenies are the ones that control the DFL, and are strangling the livelihoods of just about every Minnesotan north of US 2 that isn’t working for government or a non-profit.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I know we’re only half-way through, but can we take a moment to consider Barak Obama’s legacy as President?  How’s he shaping up against his competition?

Reagan and Bush I ended the Cold War.

Nixon opened China.

Johnson – civil rights.  Like it or hate it, he made it happen.

Kennedy – I credit the inspirational ‘put a man on the moon speech’. That was a pivotal moment.

Truman won The War by dropping The Bomb.  World changing event.

Slick Willie, Carter, Eisenhower – nothing much happened, good or bad, they’re as forgettable as Hayes or Cleveland.

The Light Bringer?  So far, the subjects for his legacy include:

the worst economy since the Great Depression

the worst race relations in 50 years
global terrorists rebounding bigger, stronger and more confident than ever
alienating our allies and destroyed all hope of working relations with our associates (China, Russia for example).
destroyed the concept of rule of law with scandals such as IRS, Fast and Furious, GM bailout
executed American citizens without trial, hearing or oversight
increased surveillance of American citizens to levels the KGB only dreamed of
has drones over everyone
has people reading this email
This is Barak Obama’s legacy – The hope and change – so far.  It’s bad enough.  And we have three years left.

Maybe if we invade Syria, things will get better?

Joe Doakes

Bill Glahn – who has become one of the essential bloggers in Minnesota – notes something I picked up on in the 2010 race; all “reporting” that might discomfit Democrats takes place at times in the cycle when even wonks are hard-pressed to pay attention, much less Joe and Jane Casual Voter. 

I noted it in 2010, when the Twin Cities media issued one – precisely one – “report” on Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism during the campaign cycle.  Eleven months before the 2010 election.   When nobody, but nobody, cared.   The Strib could tell people honestly that they had covered the issue; it was just at a time when nobody in the world was paying attention.  They buried the story just as effectively as if they’d put it on page E-18. 

As Glahn notes, they’re at it again:

Some 8 months after the data became available, the Minneapolis Star Tribune finally gets around to an analysis of campaign spending in the 2012 election.

The article (headlined “Spending on Minnesota legislative races has doubled in 10 years”) describes how much more money has poured into races for the state legislature in recent years.

Not surprisingly, they bury the lede.  Yes, lots more money is coming into these races, but in recent years, it’s almost all on the Democrat/liberal/progressive side of the ledger.

Of course they do. 

Read the whole thing.

And chalk it up to the pattern; too little, too late, too early. 

Just like the DFL needs it.

Remember when his supporters said that one of the dreamiest things about Barack Obama was that he was a “constitutional scholar?”

I said at the time that a President – a good one anyway – needs to know about as much about the Constitution as a good policeman does, and that a Constitutional Lawyer was nothing if not more prone to use his “knowlege” to circumvent rather than uphold the Constitution.

History, as just about always happens, is proving me right.

A “koan” is a paradoxical riddle, more or less.

Here’s an example: “If you have ice cream, I will give you ice cream.  If you have none, I’ll take it away”.  (It’s an “ice cream koan”). 

As Pejman Yousefsadeh points out, the paradoxical riddles about Obamacare aren’t nearly as amusing, to say nothing of sweet and creamy.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Fast food protests for minimum wage hike.

I wish reporters would ask more questions. Notice the language of the signs being held by the workers. Some are English, some are Spanish, but all are in the same colors and type font. Plainly, they were professionally printed specifically for this event.

By whom? Who put up the money to rouse this rabble? And where did THEY get the money?

It would be annoying to learn some non-profit community outreach group is being funded by my tax dollars to promote this nonsense. Or worse, if this were just a union tactic to increase their own wages by legislating an increase in the floor wages since they can’t negotiate a raise in this economy.

Annoying?  Certainly. 

But looking at the production quality of the signage, I’m not betting against it.

As I pointed out a few weeks back, people who use the word “Disrespect” as a verb are nothing but trouble.

Ripped from the headlines? Proof (with emphasis added):

Aloeng K. Vang, 19, of St. Paul, told police that he shot Jeffrey T. Elling as the victim answered the door of his home in the 1400 block of York Avenue, according to a second-degree murder charge filed Tuesday against Vang in Ramsey County District Court.

The men had argued a short time earlier after Vang allegedly turned onto Elling’s street at a high rate of speed, nearly striking Elling and his girlfriend as they crossed York Avenue. At the time, Vang was headed to a cousin’s house on the same block — a residence where people had driven recklessly before, the charges say.

During the altercation, Elling pushed Vang to the ground, and Vang, who had appeared to be intoxicated, felt disrespected…Initially, Vang, who turned himself in to police at the scene, told authorities he been driving around in an effort to cool off.

He later admitted, however, that he had gone to his house to get a gun, according to the complaint. He rang Elling’s doorbell, hid behind a tree and then fired two shots when Elling answered, Vang told police.

He added he didn’t mean to shoot Elling, only to scare him.

“I should have just whooped [him],” the charges quote Vang as saying.

Once people use the term “disrespect” as a verb, we should just through them in jail to protect whomever they might hurt in the meantime.

 Last night, I caught a bit of Hugh Hewitt.  His line is that we need to start convincing Congress to support some sort of action in Syria.  Not so much to “support the President”, but to support some sort of decisive action against Syria. 

Hugh’s a smart guy, and a great friend of mine and of the NARN broadcast.

But he’s wrong on this one.  So are all the Republicans who are getting rolled into supporting this idea – Boehner, Cantor, McCain. 

Hugh’s point is that we can’t stand by and watch children getting murdered, especially the ghastly murders we saw on YouTube last month.   There’s scarcely a person among us, especially parents, who didn’t see that video and want to load up the B52s and go all Jack Bauer on the perps.

Whoever they were.

The Motives: We’re assured it was Assad – by the same intelligence services that have been covering the President’s butt for the last year in re Benghai, and that have a worse record than the Macalester football team.  Others aren’t so sure it was Assad. 

I’m sure not.  Think about it.  Assad was slowly but surely winning his war against the rebels; by most accounts, the rebels’ tide peaked last year, and has been ebbing.  Armed by his Russian and Iranian benefactors, supported by the same parts of Syrian society that support the Mullahs’ in Iran – the not-so-photogenic rural crowd that doesn’t speak English as a second language and doesn’t make it onto NPR stories about life in Syria – Assad was slowly winning the war, block by bloody block.  It wasn’t pretty – but “bloody and ugly” can serve a dictator just as well as fast and surgical. 

There’s plenty of evidence that chemical weapons have been used many times in the Syrian Civil War, by both sides, in small, “surgical” attacks, away from the public eye. 

So with the war swinging his direction, what was, exactly, Assad’s motivation to launch a large, carpet-bombing raid with Sarin in Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar – densely-populated rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus?

Where all of the world’s media are,  ensuring the attack would receive (by police-state standards) saturation coverage?

Eggs For the Omelet:  Now, the Assad family has all kinds of blood on  its hands.  There’ve been countless massacres under the Assad family’s control of Syria.  One might surmise that all of them have been done at such a time and place and magnitude as to avoid drawing untoward Western scrutiny, since until the civil war started you probably had little to no idea of Syria’s human rights record.  Right?

And then, suddenly, 1,400 dead people, 400 of them children, killed right where all the cameras area. 

Assad isn’t above doing it – but what would be the point of bringing down the opprobium of the entire world just as the war is starting to swing his way?

But the extreme elements of the “rebels?”   Killing their own people has been a treasured part of the extremist playbook for centuries.  The French, Russian and Chinese revolutions are clogged with tales of extremists killing their own people, or allowing them to be killed, for propaganda purposes.  It serves several purposes; it’s grade A grist for the propaganda mill, and if you do it right,  you get rid of some of the “allies” that you’ll need to dispense with to solidify your own faction’s control (see Marat, the Mensheviks, Ernst Röhm).  All of them – especially the children – are eggs that regrettably must be broken to make the omelet. 

I think the case against the “rebels” makes a lot more sense than the one against Assad. 

Politics:Leaving aside the actual incident?  Obama is playing the GOP for fools.  And they’re obliging.

If it succeeds, of course, Obama – aided by his compliant Praetorian Guard in the media – will engineer a Caesarian triumph.  The NYTimes will proclaim that it’s Obama’s victory.    That’d happen whether he gets Congressional approval or, for that matter, if he’d disregarded Congress and charged in with guns blazing. 

By seeking Congressional approval – and going through the charade of being seen to “want” GOP buy-in – Obama is setting up the GOP up to take the blame when the action turns into a fiasco.  As it pretty likelly will – more below.   

This, as Obamacare spirals into full debacle mode, as the IRS and Benghazi and NSA and Fast and Furious scandals are begging for attention, and as the economic “recovery” starts to look more and more like a high-functioning coma. 

The Fiasco Within:  George Patton summed up the goal of war pretty well.  You kill the enemy as fast and as violently and as constantly as you can, so that the war ends as soon as possible, with victory.   You know your objective, and you kill whatever it takes to achieve it, because it’s in acheiving the objective that the war ends with as many of your people as possible alive.

And I picture Patton – or really any soldier worthy of the uniform – looking at Obama’s puling, PR-focus-grouped “plan”, replete with “sending messages” and “degrading capabilities” and “punishing the regime”, and puking his guts out with revulsion. 

You do not risk American lives to “send messages”.

You do not parlay American blood and treasure to rap a gangster thug across the knuckles and mess with his networks. 

You do either, or both, to win the war, provided that the war was worth fighting in the first place; that American security and interests were genuinely, tangibly threatened, in a war that makes and keeps this country safer. 

So why are we flirting with an action that could open a huge regional war – and blow up what’s left of our economy to boot?  What’s the objective that’s worth so much American blood and treasure?

Even our military has a hard time explaining.  And that’s a huge problem.

On the other hand, some of our greatest, most rational minds on the subject of military action – Victor Davis Hanson among ’em – can spell out the case against intervention in so many ways you’re tempted to say “enough with the overkill”. 

Wag The Boehner: This action is the tail wagging the dog.  I strongly suspect that it’s an epic deception – and whether it is or isn’t, it’s being manipulated by the Administration for political purposes, to give a war-weary public something else to hold against Republicans in 2014, just in time to give Obama control of the House. 

And John Boehner and Eric Cantor are aiding and abetting it. 

Are they doing it for all the right reasons – to avenge the dead children.  Who doesn’t want to keep the children safe?  Everyone!

Sure.  And so they’ll go down in history – having been brutally manipulated into a colossal mistake, for all the right reasons.

The fact is, I have a lot of questions about the minimum wage debate.

Of course, the uncountably vast majority of people who are earning minimum wage are kids, or others who are just entering the workforce.  People who haven’t yet developed even the most rudimentary work skills – like showing up on time, much less running the shake machine or the deep fryer with authority.

But there are people earning the minimum wage who do, in fact, have themselves and others depending on their income.

If you’re a conservative, you no doubt suspect that that sad state is because of poor choices; partying too much in high school and not getting an education; having children out of wedlock; working on the easy crime career before developing the boring straight career.

Of course, not every person is affected by their own choices.  When you party you way into your twenties, do jail time, get knocked up and wind up having to raise a family on a wage that wouldn’t support a single person, you are very likely passing a lot of problems on to the next generation; you’re passing your bad, shortsighted, immature and/or stupid choices on to them.  “Personal Responsibility” is great when it’s just your own choices affecting you – but when your parents, and grandparents, were idiots or drunks or screw-ups, what’s a kid to do?

(And if you’re the progeny of a couple of generations of people who made good choices, worked hard, got good jobs and dedicated themselves to helping you make good choices, too, then thank whatever it is you believe in.  It’s a major leg up in life).

Now, I’m not sure how many of Jessica English’s choices were her ancestors, and how many were hers.  But the media certainly is playing up the results – the state of Ms. English’s life today:

Jessica English is the face of a newly revived effort to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage.

Ms. English, speaking at the Minnesota State Fair, illustrating the dangers of poverty to cute, white women from Wayzata who choose to work in art.

She earned minimum wage while working in rural western Minnesota, places such as Fergus Falls, Ortonville and Kerkhoven. A case worker called it the “land of the minimum wage.”

Now, the 35-year-old divorced mother said she faces losing custody of her four daughters, ages 6 to 15, because she earned so little, even though her finances improved a bit since moving to St. Paul.

On the one hand?  That sounds scary – being 35 and up against it like that.   Now, I have no idea what got Ms. English to this point in her life – single, four kids, job skills worth $6.15 an hour.

(As to the “losing custody” bit, though?  Er, if she was a single father – presuming that’s who Ms. English would be contesting for custody – would the media even care?  What if the father is better able to provide a decent life for the kids?  The double standard is nothing new).

But the fact is, one does make choices in one’s life.  I’ve made a few; I left radio, my first career, when I was married and had two kids and another on the way, and was making $6.50/hour, and painstakingly taught myself how to convince managers I was a competent technical writer.  I adapted.  I did what it took to develop a skill that would get me and my family out of poverty.  I don’t want, or deserve, a cookie for that – that’s what you do when you have a family; you take care of them.  I had some blessings, of course; I’d gotten a passable education when I had the chance, I’d avoided doing any jail time, that sort of thing. Perhaps my greatest blessing?  Growing up in a place and time when “not being ready to raise a family when I had one” still had some moral weight.

And it’d seem Ms. English has learned that lesson, at least in part.  The article notes that her financial situation has “improved a bit since moving to St. Paul”.

Where she works – for an inadequate wage, perhaps, although we don’t know – as a “community organizer” for “The Coffee Party”, the beyond-astroturf liberal-plutocrat-funded “response” to the Tea Party. 

In other words, one of the liberal-plutocrat-supported non-profits that’s agitating for a “living wage” apparently won’t provide one. 

Judging by Ms. English’s rap sheet, she spent the last several years working in the public/non-profit art business – a famously penurious racket, usually the province of trust fund babies, bored housewives and young, no-strings-attached arts majors.

I don’t know Ms. English.  But how much weight should the media give the testimony of a person who has apparently dedicated herself to finding and remaining in poverty?

And how much should Minnesota’s real working poor – the 20 year olds scrambling for their first jobs at Burger King, who will be the first to get laid off when the robots do finally take over the fast food business, the immigrants who are working as many minimum wage jobs as they can while they learn English and develop other skills, the poor kids who need to some some reassurance that there’s a future in working the straight and narrow rather than turning to crime – have to pay for such dilettantism?

Because it’s their jobs – not the “Community Organizer” jobs for fashionable lefty non-profits – that’ll be disappearing.

UPDATE:  Someone emailed “aren’t you being a bit condescending?”

Me?  Not a bit.  There’s a reason that the poverty pimps are trotting out an attractive white woman instead of a 30 year old Somali immigrant.  Put another way – the proponents of the minimum wage hike are doing the condescending, here.

Since the end of World War II, the mantra of government and business is that “we need more kids to grow up to study Science, Technology, Engineering and Math” – aka “STEM”. 

And yet if you work in technology, you know that in vast swathes of the field, there’s no real shortage of people.  Especially in IT; even as baby boomers retire, there is plenty of unemployment among IT people; even as demand for IT workers booms, the supply seems to more than keep pace.  Have you checked out the contract rate for web coders or support analysts lately? 

And yet the government keeps cajoling our “best and brightest” to go into STEM. 

Why?  

To keep the costs down, perhaps?

As this piece in the IEEE Spectrum notes, not only is there no shortage of STEM professionals, there’s an apparent skills mismatch, with many “STEM” careers being held by non-STEM degree-holders (I’d be one of them, by the way), and many STEM degree-holders working outside science and technology.

And yet the establishment keeps driving more people into STEM, and importing more programmers, engineers and technicians from overseas. 

Why?

Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

And it helps inflate the higher-ed bubble, too:

And the perception of a STEM crisis benefits higher education, says Ron Hira, because as “taxpayers subsidize more STEM education, that works in the interest of the universities” by allowing them to expand their enrollments.

An oversupply of STEM workers may also have a beneficial effect on the economy, says Georgetown’s Nicole Smith, one of the coauthors of the 2011 STEM study. If STEM graduates can’t find traditional STEM jobs, she says, “they will end up in other sectors of the economy and be productive.”

The problem with proclaiming a STEM shortage when one doesn’t exist is that such claims can actually create a shortage down the road, Teitelbaum says. When previous STEM cycles hit their “bust” phase, up-and-coming students took note and steered clear of those fields, as happened in computer science after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

Emphasizing STEM at the expense of other disciplines carries other risks. Without a good grounding in the arts, literature, and history, STEM students narrow their worldview—and their career options. In a 2011 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, argued that point. “In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80 000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers,” he wrote. “But the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.”

For all the sneering people are doing at humanities these days – and I have a BA in English with minors in History and German – the selling of the STEM “crisis” seems to be a move to commoditize technical skill.  Communications is no commodity, though – and it seems to be what still what separates a bench engineer and their supervisors. 

So is the education system short-changing students by preaching STEM as the be-all and end-all of opportunities?

Glossy signs at well-fed protests scheduled with impeccable precision nationwide. 

High-profile politicians pushing the idea in full view of their compliant media.

Yep – the push to jack up the minimum wage is being pushed from every angle by the usual lefty suspects.

And it may be the apotheosis of the liberal campaign strategy – all full of Alinskyite sturm und drang, coupled with an onslaught of gauzy guiltmongering and the idea that we should increase the minimum wage not merely For The Children, but because it just plain feels good.

I caught this last night on MPR, on “The Story”, a North Carolina Public Radio production that seems to be aimed at being a downmarket Terry Gross. 

 Go ahead, check out the interview with Ms. Elisha St. Laurent, who is a woman…

…no.  Ms. St. Laurent is not a person.  She is an archtype, one that’s becoming inescapable in the media’s coverage of the issue – the “single mother and student” who was trying to make it on minimum wage (which, in San Jose, is already $8, albeit in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country).  She’s one of the bunch of – I kid you not – San Jose State sociology students who who organized a voter drive that led to the city jacking up its statutory minimum wage to $10/hour.  The measure passed with – no big shock – the Bay Area voters, and went into effect in March. 

You’ll listen in vain to the interview – clogged as it is with references to “empowerment” and “finding voices” – to any reference to the jobs that are being cut around San Jose.  Indeed, you have to look a solid dozen paragraphs into this story, in the San Jose Mercury, to hear that there is a downside to artificially raising the price of unskilled and semi-skilled labor. 

Apparently small businesses aren’t as “empowered” and haven’t “found their voices” yet.

Brits have been fighing, and dying, alongside Americans in the Middle East for over 20 years now. 

But if you stand up Obama?  Time to bring in the bouncers:

British military chiefs are being ejected from US meetings about Syria in the first direct consequence of David Cameron’s refusal to join military action.

The role of senior British officers based at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, has been downgraded because they cannot be trusted with high-level intelligence about a conflict with which they are no longer involved, military sources say.

Say what you will about the idea of the war itself. 

But this is further evidence that Obama isn’t just the worst president of my lifetime, but perhaps the dumbest.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Unconstitutional and ineffective. Pretty much sums up his whole administration.

First, military surplus rifles have been imported for years and sold out of the NRA magazine. They’re not automatic weapons, they’re antiques. German Mauser rifles. Russian sniper rifles from the Siege of Stalingrad. M-1 rifles we left behind in Korea. Now, we’re going to ban anybody from bringing them into the country? Why? Who does the rule affect? A few people who collect antique rifles. It will have absolutely no impact on crime.

Second, the ATF received 39,000 requests to transfer restricted weapons to gun trusts last year. Restricted weapons are machine guns. Transfers of machine guns require ATF approval, a fee, background investigation, etc. It’s not the same as buying a regular gun, it’s a big deal, even if the transfer is simply from me to my son. So some smart lawyers came up with the idea of putting the gun into the trust. The trust owns the gun, not me, so the beneficiaries of the trust can use it but the trust continues to own it.

Not one single person who was killed in America last year, was killed by an ATF-registered machine gun. The new rule affects collectors, not criminals. It will have absolutely no impact on crime.

Joe Doakes

Barack Obama: afflicting the afflicted, comforting the comfortable.

The Nobel Peace-Prize-winning Obama Administration has been beating the war drums like John Bonham has risen from the dead and wants to get through the gig so he can trash the hotel already

And still we’ve seen no sign of Madea Benjamin.

Or Cindy “Absolute Moral Authority” Sheehan.

Or Code Pink.

Their relatives are starting to get nervous.

If you have any information as to their whereabouts, please call 1-976-PEACECREEPS.

Thanks.

The democratic and legislative process of our allies – sovereign nations all…:

So when Prime Minister David Cameron was unable to muster the votes in Parliament for support for a strike in Syria — even one limited to stopping the future use of chemical weapons — shock could be heard in the voices of senior White House officials who never saw the British rejection coming.

“Bungled by Cameron,” said one.

“Embarrassing,” said another. “For Cameron, and for us.”

Now Mr. Obama is left to cope with miscalculations on both sides of the Atlantic.

…are there for the mocking by our current pack of ruling fratboys.

Just Remember:

Given that this actually is Obama’s supporters best line (literally – “Bush did it first, so don’t be teh hypocret” is the gyst of not a few lefties’ responses to criticsm), it’s hard to even call it “satire”. 

Call it “Journalism”.