The Twin Cities’ assembly of gun grabbers is having a meeting tomorrow.  And you’re invited!

Sort of.  More on that in a bit.

Anyway – if you’re out and about tomorrow (Friday) morning (and it always seems these anti-gunners are unemployed, work for non-profits or retired, and have ample weekdaytime to devote to attacking other peoples’ civil rights), it might be fun to drop by.

Here’s the invite, and the agenda, more or less:

———-

Dear ***********,

It’s happened again. In Nevada, a 13-year-old brought a semiautomatic handgun to school, killed a teacher and wounded two students, and then killed himself.

This can’t keep happening — and it won’t stop on its own. We all have to step up.

On Friday, Oct. 25, Protect Minnesota is hosting a Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities summit for all who want to create safe, peaceful communities free of gun violence. Can you be there? Click here to RSVP**

Where: Shiloh Temple International Ministries, 1201 W. Broadway, Minneapolis

When: Friday, Oct. 25 from 10 am – 3:45 p.m., with lunch provided.

Find out what’s next in this important work and what your role can be. Sessions include:

— Changing the narrative around gun violence prevention

— Developing effective media strategy

— A deep dive on gun policy in Minnesota

— Grassroots lobbying

— Creating change with personal stories

Together, we can change the conversation around gun violence at this critical time in the history of gun violence prevention. Click here to RSVP.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama famously promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under the Affordable Care Plan.

Well, you can keep him IF he joins the new plan.  He doesn’t have to.  And many won’t.  So here’s your shiny new Obama-care card.  Now go try to use it.

Also, Obama-care will save money, Congress will have the same deal as we, and Gitmo will be closed.

Joe Doakes

 

We’ll have hope, along with all of that change…

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG walks into a coffee shop in Linden Hills, a tony neighborhood in South Minneapolis.  He orders a large light roast when, from out of frame to the left, a finger taps him on the shoulder.  BERG turns around to see Avery LIBRELLE standing behind him).

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  You know how you are always saying you want a dialog, an informed debate, with people across the aisle?

BERG:  Er, sure – I was kinda on my way to work, but…

LIBRELLE:  There you go with that “Work” thing, again.  You’re not even employed by a non-profit!  Anyway – I brought a friend.  It’s time for dialog and debate!

BERG:  Well..OK, but I don’t have much time…

LIBRELLE:  You can always make time for debate.  Come on!

(LIBRELLE leads BERG through the small crowd of thick-rimmed-glasses-clad hipsters, all of them so focused on their mobile devices they’ve adopted a “Walking-Dead”-style shamble, and to a table in the back corner where Edwin DUCHEY, a forty-something fellow with thick-rimmed glasses and a mobile device, sits.   BERG and LIBRELLE take seats, forming a triangle of people separated as widely as geometrically possible around the circular table). 

LIBRELLE:  Mitch, this is Ed DuChey, proprietor of the blog Minnesota Liberal Alliance Dot Blogspot Dot Com. 

BERG:  A pleasure.  (DUCHEY glares)

LIBRELLE:  Mitch is my…neighbor, and he writes Shot in the Dark.

DUCHEY:  (in a nasal, adenoidal voice) Shit in the Park!  (Snorts, sips his latte.   LIBRELLE giggles as BERG rolls his eyes)

LIBRELLE:  Anyway, Mitch says he’s always open for dialog and debate with the “other side”. 

BERG:  Yeah, I guess I do. 

DUCHEY:  I called your blog “Shit in the Park!”  (Giggles to self as BERG stares, jaw barely under controlled tension and with an air of ill-concealed pity)

LIBRELLE:  So let’s talk about the state of the Republican Party.

BERG:  The Tea Party was a much-needed populist expression of the party’s real conservative roots.  The Tea Party class of 2010 was actually the one bright spot for the GOP in the Minnesota legislature this past two years. 

DUCHEY:  You’re stupid. 

BERG:  Huh.  Care to elaborate?

DUCHEY:  You’re really stupid.  The Teabaggers were full of hate and racism and they were stupider than you.

LIBRELLE:  Interesting.  OK.  How about the shutdown.

BERG:  My jury’s still out.

DUCHEY:  Your jury is stupid and so are you.

BERG:  Huh.  (Looks around the room, as hipsters stagger, focused on their mobile devices, toward counter)

LIBRELLE:  Good point, Ed.  OK.  How about the Affordable Care Act?

BERG:  Jeez, read the headlines.  It’s jacking up practically everyone’s rates and deductibles, the people who claim they’re saving money – the ones that aren’t busted lying in the first place – never acknowledge that there’s a huge taxpayer subsidy involved, and the people who are getting through on the exchanges are the ones with the massive pre-existing conditions, while healthy people are staying away in droves, meaning the system is going to be paying out huge and taking in nothing, which completely breaks down the idea of a “risk pool”. 

DUCHEY:  You’re…wait, I got a text message.  (DUCHEY laboriously types a long text message into his iPhone – and gets a reply, giggles, and replies to it, before returning to the conversation) You’re a stupid teabagging wingnut. 

LIBRELLE:  You’re right, Mitch.  Dialog and debate is fun!  (Looks at BERG)

(BERG has, however, left the table and the building).

(Horde of thick-rimmed-glasses-clad hipsters shamble forward in line, hissing and hacking and making prehensile noises).

(And SCENE).

The Vice President on home security:

It’s even funnier than Heather Martens endorsing the Colt .45.

Ted Nugent, famous gonzo guitarist and gun nut, says that armed, law-abiding citizens are likely the only coherent way that open societies have to protect against “soft target” terror attacks like the massacre Westgate Mall in Nairobi:

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

Noble’s comments came only moments after the official opening of the 82nd annual gathering of the Interpol’s governing body, the General Assembly. The session is being held in Cartagena, Colombia, and is being used to highlight strides over the last decade in Colombia’s battle against the notorious drug cartels that used to be the real power in the country.

The secretary general, an American who previously headed up all law enforcement for the U.S. Treasury Department, told reporters during a brief news conference that the Westgate mall attack marks what has long been seen as “an evolution in terrorism.” Instead of targets like the Pentagon and World Trade Center that now have far more security since 9/11, attackers are focusing on sites with little security that attract large numbers of people.

Wait – “Noble?”  I thought it was Ted Nugent…

…oh, I can’t keep a straight face.  It’s not Ted Nugent.  It’s Ronald Noble, who is in charge of Interpol. 

And if Interpol – an agent of international statism – is finally twigging to the idea that the citizens are their own best last line of defense (short of absurd levels of “security”, which we all know means “Security Theater”, and for the most part immense sacrifice of freedom. 

Your choice.

Rand Paul proposes a constitutional amendment barring Congress from exempting itself from laws. 

Like, say, Obamacare.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The thing I like about Richard Fernandez is that he thinks about systems, about consequences, about the unseen effects. You never get that in the mainstream media or day-to-day political reporting.

If we consolidate everything into one system, we’ll all be equal and everything will be fair. But what if that single system crashes?

From the comments, a great analysis of why public transit is doomed, and always, always requires massive subsidies:

“Private Subways and buses were able to charge premium fare prices because the alternative to their service was the enormous cost of owning a horse — purchasing a horse, stabling it, feeding it, exercising it and watching it depreciate as it aged — all in the context of a crowded inner city. That the rise of the automobile industry began the process of making private subways and buses uneconomical. The affordable, convenient alternative to owning a horse shifted from the subways and buses to owning an automobile. The car was much cheaper. This will never change. Today’s mass-transit planners are permanently stuck in the 19th century — providing a service that fewer and fewer people want at increasingly high prices — and they have no idea why their projects are going bankrupt, because they have no idea why the great transit systems they are trying to recreate went bankrupt, or were even created in the first place.”

Yep.

Joe Doakes

“Today’s GOP wouldn’t endorse Reagan!”

It’s an ofay little meme that’s been trotted out for the last couple of years by a bunch of liberals who might, on a good day, stick to trying to whiz on Reagan’s grave, with the aim of trying to undercut the “independent” vote going to conservatives as they did for Reagan. 

They note that Reagan passed legislation controlling guns, legalizing abortion and raising taxes.  The first was an error of judgment while governor of California for which he more than atoned later in his career; the latter two, errors involving trusting Democrats to hold up their ends of deals; in the case of the taxes, the “increases” were both results of Tip O’Neil’s perfidy and a small fraction of the cuts he’d implemented earlier in his administration; they happened at a time when the economy was humming along, rather than on life support; dumb, but not dumber. 

But the meme almost rises to the level of a Berg’s Seventh Law violation – because while Reagan would likely do just fine in today’s GOP (his strength was in building coalitions of diverse people toward common ends, something the GOP needs today even more than it did in 1980), the great Democrat hero, John F. Kennedy, would get run out of most Democrat meetings on a rail:

Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.

The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.

He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.’ ”

 

On the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation’s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. “We must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,” JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today’s levels. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit for building the US military into “a defense system second to none.”

 

Read the whole thing.  And send it to your Democrat friends.

JFK, whatever his foibles and peccadilloes, would puke his guts out at the legacy of John Kerry, much less Barack Obama.

The Lightworker’s Gallup ratings are down in Dubya territory.

Death Panels don’t exist Death Panels always existed, citizen.  And They are a wonderful thing!

(Note to anyone who’s ever worked in health insurance: you know that Death Panels have existed for decades.  It’s called “Care Management”, and HMOs have been doing them since the seventies or eighties. And while the linked article relates to Canada, Obamacare is no different.  I present this mainly as an academic exercise, so you can see if your lefty friends start changing the spin they put out…)

It’s true.

And about 100% of my “entertainment news”, too.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Not as many people are filing for bankruptcy, only about 1 million people a year, down from an average of 1.5 million that has remained fairly steady for the past 20 years.

There are 300 million people in the whole country, 80 million of whom are children that can’t file.

If 1.5 million go broke year after year and I’m 50 years old, then 75 million people – nearly 25% of the country – has gone bankrupt in my lifetime.

Wow, how much better can The New Economy get?

Joe Doakes

Can? Much.

Will? Ugh.

It’s almost 2014.  Almost time for another mid-term election that’s going to pit the MNGOP – the party of plucky volunteers, creative fundraisers and circular firing squads – against the Minnesota DFL, the policy body on whose narrative’s behalf the Unions, the non-profits, the trial bar, the media, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and a whooole lot of plutocrats with deep pockets and deeper white liberal guilt spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and hours of paid labor.

The Minnesota GOP has always been a party of uneasy factions – although it really became an issue after about 1994, when the Reagan Revolution finally poked its nose out into the Minnesota cold.

The GOP has quite a few factions these days:

• The “Liberty” Movement.  The “Ron Paul” clique took the party by storm in 2012 with a very effective organization – and, arguably, waned badly by the end of the year, as people realized that some parts of the organization -some (by no means all) of their delegates to the 2012 RNC in Tampa, the leadership in CD5 and CD4 – were more interested in sticking it to the GOP than going after the DFL.  Maybe they waned as their activists walked away.  Maybe they’re keeping their powder dry.  Maybe the dumb ones went away and the smart ones – like most of the “Liberty” activists in CD2, or my own SD65, among others – focused their energies on actually winning elections.   Either way, they’re a faction.  As, for that matter, is the more-mainstream but equally liberty-conscious “Liberty Caucus”…
• The Tea Party – The wave of activists that came out, in many cases for the first time, in the wake of Obamacare.   They’ve had a disproportionate impact on the GOP; many of the most effective conservatives in the Legislature came from the Tea Party class of 2010 and 2012; go ahead, count the number of Tea Party candidates on the Taxpayers League’s Best Friends of the Taxpayers list.  The Tea Party class of 2010 drove the GOP to the right – which was a very good thing.
• The Social Conservatives – They’re out there.  They don’t get much press these days – the media has moved on to calling fiscalcons “extremists” these days – but there are enough pro-lifers, traditional marriage supporters and anti-stem-cell people to sway endorsements in a good chunk of Minnesota.  They aren’t the power bloc they used to be, but they are still important – and not just at endorsement time. 
• “Moderates”:  We know they exist – the media keeps telling us so. And someone voted for Tom Horner.  Seriously?  I may have met two Republicans in the past decade who still pine for the days of Arne Carlson.  But the GOP still has the likes of Jim Abeler, in whose district the conventional wisdom says he’s the most conservative candidate who can win (as it once said about Steve Smith and Connie Doepke and Geoff Michel; the conventional wisdom was right once…), and places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul where that same conventional wisdom says that the likes of Norm Coleman and Cam Winton are the most conservative candidates who have a shot at actually winning elections.  And the record shows they have a point.
• The Establishment:  Who are “the Establishment?”   Good question.  “The Establishment”, as cited by the Liberty clique in 2012, sometimes seems a bit like Keyser Soze; everyone’s heard of it, but nobody’s seen it.  Who is “the establishment?”  I’ve been called “the establishment”, as recently as last winter at my “Liberty”-dominated Senate District.  Near as I can tell, “The Establishment” is the network of big-money donors that have been the party’s fiscal major muscles.  Pragmatic, not especially invested in any ideology, infuriating to the people in all the factions above for whom principle reigns and pragmatism comes in a distant second if it shows up at all.

The Liberty movement likes to claim that the GOP can not win without it.  There’s a germ of truth to that.  The GOP needs the Liberty crowd’s numbers – and Liberty movement will never win anything on its own, either.

Beyond that?  None of the GOP’s factions is worth anything on its own; all of them are minorities within a large minority in this state.

And as long as the factions are bickering with each other, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell the Party is going to be of any use helping candidates reach out to enough undecideds, “independents” and newcomers to activism to help them get to the majority.

And the shame of it is, the factions do agree on almost everything!

The Party – as in, the office full of functionaries down at 225 Park Avenue, kitty corner from the Capitol – needs to hold a “meeting of the five families”.  They need – in my humble opinion – to get the leadership of the various factions together to agree to put aside the things they disagree on (in public, anyway), and focus on the things that do, in fact, tie us together as a party.  Which involves negotiating – something most of the factions eschew – but negotiating with an aim toward changing the state’s (and the party’s) political climate so that all of the factions  have a shot at making the difference they want to make.

This might mean carving up some “turf”, ideologically.  It might also mean all of the factions realizing that even if you’re a liberty Republican or a pro-lifer, having a Tea Partier or a business-first conservative in office is going to be a better proposition for your cause than, say, two chambers full of Paul Thissens.

Idealistic?   Sure.  I’m a conservative in Saint Paul.  Idealism keeps me alive.

Pollyannaish?  About as Pollyannaish as Don Corleone’s “meeting of the five families”;  the MNGOP’s fratricidal bloodletting is a waste of everyone’s time and effort.

Making the GOP effective means finding a way to get the major factions to work together against the real enemy.

That’d be the DFL, for the benefit of some people I’ve met lately.

And – just a quick poll here – how has two years of circular firing squad done us any favors?

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG climbs out of his car and fishes a big gym bag full of firearms and ammo out of the back seat.  He walks toward the front door of the firing range – and notices Avery LIBRELLE, walking, alone, with a picket sign.  The sign says “A Millian Americans Are Picketting This Gun Rang”.  BERG hides his face, and tries to time his approach while LIBRELLE is walking the other way – but a piece of shiny tinfoil attracts LIBRELLE’s attention back toward BERG).

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG:  Oh…uh, hi, Avery. What’s new?

LIBRELLE:  I think MoveOn.Org has the right idea!  It’s time to start arresting teabaggers for sedition!

BERG:  Sedition?

LIBRELLE: Speaking out against the government!

BERG: I know what sedition is. That’s not what the House Republicans or Cruz or Paul did. 

LIBRELLE: The “Affordable Care Act” is the law!  And the law is the manifestation of government!   And if you oppose The Law, you oppose Government, meaning you oppose the will of The People!

BERG:  Well, no.  The GOP majority in the House carried out the House’s Constitutional duty to take care of the nation’s purse-strings – a job for which the voters of this country gave them the majority at the polls in 2010 and 2012. 

LIBRELLE:  Yeah, but the people also elected President Obama twice. He is the government, and his laws are the laws of the land, the revealed word of the people!

BERG:  The President is not “the government”.  The government is the executive branch – the President and his staff and the rest of the bureaucracy – the Legislative branch, and the judicial branch, and – don’t forget this – all of the checks and balances in between all of them. 

LIBRELLE: Well, the “Affordable Care Act” is now the law.

BERG:  So?  The First Amendment says we have the right to free speech, to assemble, and to petition to seek redress of grievances.  Which is, in every particular, what the Tea Party is and always has been. 

LIBRELLE:  What are you, a constitutional scholar?  I’m pretty sure those are all collective rights, just like the Second Amendment. 

BERG:  What now?

LIBRELLE:  Anyway – Obamacare is the law, which means it’s the will of the people, and the government IS the people, so fighting the law is fighting the people.  “Sedition” is probably the nicest word for it.

BERG:  Again – what now?

LIBRELLE:  I’d call it “Treason”.

BERG:  “Treason?”  Actively betraying your country to an enemy in wartime?

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  This country’s been at war against poverty since the sixties.  Obamacare fights poverty.  Undercutting the people in the War on Poverty IS betraying your country in wartime.  That’s the very definition of treason!  We should sic the military on all of you!

BERG:  Huh.  The military.   (Takes stick of gum from pocket, unwraps it, pops gum in mouth).

LIBRELLE:  Tanks.  Choppers.  Whatever it takes. 

BERG:  To preserve democracy.

LIBRELLE:   Yep. 

BERG:  Huh. 

(BERG drops shiny tinfoil wrapper onto the ground.  LIBRELLE chases it, allowing BERG to make his escape).

(And SCENE).

“My Way or the Highway” absolutists aren’t new to politics in any party, much less the GOP.  In 2000, it was hard to get any traction in some caucuses I remember if candidates weren’t not only pro-life, but weren’t sufficiently, convincingly pro-life enough.  It was the litmus test for a lot of people.

I think it was Ronald Reagan who said “if someone is 80% your friend, it doesn’t make them 20% your enemy”.  And beyond that, William F. Buckley enjoined conservatives to “vote for the most conservative candidate who can win“.

There are a few such groups in the GOP today that just don’t buy that; some of the Ron Paul crowd, and some traditional conservatives, have morphed over to the “Anything less than 100% might as well be 0%” school of thought.

It’s easy to sigh and roll your eyes and chuckle “that’s naive” – and then catch yourself for doing it, since there’s almost nothing in the world (short of adults who hang around comic book stores) more annoying that people who roll their eyes and chuckle about other people’s politics. 

But chuckling and rolling is a bad idea, if only because it prevents the possibility of anyone learning anything.  And a little learning is simply desperately needed.

Here’s a great example; over the weekend, I interviewed Cam Winton, the moderate Republican candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis.  He’s a sharp guy, and he’s got a genuine chance to shock the world in Minneapolis next month, and if I were a dishonest guy I’d figure out a way to get to Minneapolis and vote for him a couple of times, just like the Democrats do.

Now, in the great Republican scheme of things Winton’s a moderate.  And I’m not.  On the show, since the topic came up, he specifically listed three areas where a base conservative – like the AM1280 audience – might disagree with him; he supported gay marriage, he supports background checks at gun shows (provided that it can be shown they can’t be turned into a registry for confiscation) and…er, something else that I can’t remember.

Against that?  Winton advocates bringing a whole lot of free market common sense to Minneapolis; cutting spending, prioritizing the spending that’s left better (cops and roads, in a city with the highest crime and worst roads in Minnesota), cutting the pork (streetcar lines, city power co-ops), slashing mindless regulation of small business and much more.  He favors giving Minneapolis’ taxpayer a bigger bang for fewer bucks – something Minneapolis desperately needs after two generations of DFL spendthrifts. 

And I had a couple of Minneapolis conservatives write me after the show.  One wrote and said he’d sit the election out until Minneapolis got “a real conservative” running for Mayor.  To which I replied “Tom Tancredo is never going to get 51% of any vote in Minneapolis.  Ever.  You’ll never even get Rhonda Sivarajah or Dave Thompson or Jeff Johnson over the top for mayor in Minneapolis.  Cam Winton is the closest to a conservative I’ve seen running for office in the 28 years I’ve been watching Minneapolis politics that’s had a credible chance of winning.  Perfect is the enemy of good enough, especially when you’re a Republican in a city full of Democrat workers and clients”.

Put another way; Minnesota conservatives complained about Norm Coleman’s conservatism.  But none of them have shown me how a more conservative candidate could have even gotten into position to stage a credible run for mayor of Saint Paul – and that was 20 years ago, when the Saint Paul DFL still had people like Norm, Jerry Blakey and Randy Kelley – all of whom have been purged.

Another critic, a Twin Cities Second Amendment activist, decried Winton’s stance on background checks.

To which I respond:  Minneapolis is run by people who invite Michael Bloomberg to town; people who support Michael Paymar; people who would schuss right past background checks to ban every gun you own, if they could.  So even if you leave out the fiscally-conservative stuff completely (and you must not!), how would electing a person who favors just about the weakest credible “gun control” there, is provided that it could be made non-threatening in terms of confiscation (an iffy compromise, but one we made, successfullly, on the NICS system 20-odd years ago) be any worse than the current, anti-Second-Amendment, gun-grabber-friendly Mayor, or all of the DFL front-runners for the office who are at least as bad as Rybak, and jointly and severally worse than anything Winton is proposing…

…all of which is completely irrelevant, since the Mayor of Minneapolis, or any city in Minnesota, can have absolutely no policy impact on gun control, or any impact beyond their “bully pulpit” at all (and ask Representatives Paymar and Martens how much that bully pulpit got them this last session) by state law?   That’s right – the state’s pre-emption statute bars cities from having gun laws more restrictive than the state law!

On the issue of victim disarmament, the Mayor of Minneapolis – whatever their party or their beliefs – is as relevant as a promise ring on Kim Kardashian.  If Minneapolis elected a mayor whose entire platform was “melt down every gun”, it would be the same as electing a mayor with no platform at all.  It’s the law.

More realistically – if Minneapolis elects Cam Winton (and I hope they do), it’ll be a huge benefit to Minneapolis citizens and property tax payers – and a net gain for Minneapolis gun owners from the bully pulpit (it’s just not a big issue to Winton), and an absolute “no change” in terms of policy – because the City of Minneapolis has as much control over gun control policy as it does over building nuclear submarines and setting the federal budget; it’s not a job the law gives them.

Principle is a great thing.  One of the most important principles, I think, is analyzing ones’ principles to see if they’re making you do dumb things.

You vote for the most conservative (or libertarian-conservative, if you’re me) candidate who can win.  At the moment, in Minneapolis, that candidate is Cam Winton – who I am proud to support, “imperfections” and all.  He is the most conservative candidate who can win; not just because Minneapolis is a solid blue city, but because he is the most conservative candidate to have posted a single lawn sign, appeared at a single debate, knocked on a single door, gotten a single media appearance – much less running a pretty masterful campaign to boot. 

Yes, conservatives; there could come a time in the future when government by “moderate” Republicans as a sensible and solitary sane alternative to Democrat hegemony starts to convince the unconvinced that “Republican” and “conservative” aren’t the untrammeled evils that their establishment and media (pardon the redundancy) have been programming them to think.  Hint:  You’re not going to get there with 20 more years of R.T. Rybaks and Chris Colemans in power.  It’s happened before, in a place you may have heard of; the state of Minnesota.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota DHS claims 10% of Minnesotans lack health insurance.

Liberals claimed 140,000 Minnesotans would gain access to affordable health insurance under Obamacare.

Star Tribune reported on October 15 that 400 Minnesotans have signed up.

Of course, the Star-Tribune headline claims 3,700 signed up but that includes another 3,300 people who signed up for Medicare or MinnCare, welfare programs to provide health insurance for poor people.  But these new people were eligible for welfare without Obamacare so yes, they now have health insurance, but no, it had nothing to do with Obamacare.

On the other hand, the government is hiring thousands of new IRS agents.  Maybe Obamacare should be considered a shovel-ready jobs program?  At least this program is producing some jobs.

Joe Doakes

 I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that the regional version of “Journo-list” has reached a tacit agreement to report all non-disasters as triumphs for Obamacare and its local companion.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Obama and Boehner both came to the same conclusion—that they would allow the shutdown to persist for two weeks, until it became politically possible to reopen government and address the threat of default at the same time.”   From this article in the Strib.

If that’s an accurate statement, then Boehner must be removed as Speaker today.

Joe Doakes

I think the only people that disagree are the people who think “the system” basically works…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The House Stenographer was hauled away when Republicans were voting to cave in, shouting about God and Freemasons.  Apparently, she’s had enough.

 

I know just how she feels.

 

The Washington Generals always lose to the Harlem Globetrotters but at least they play the whole game, they don’t quit and start high-fiving each other.  I wonder where I can get some Washington Generals jerseys to send to Boehner, Cantor, McCain . . . .

 

Joe Doakes

Some days, being a Republican feels like being an offensive lineman for Cumberland College.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Boehner: “Tell you what, Barry, I’ve got a little popularity problem with my own party so here’s what we do:  we let the right-wing crazy people shut down the government for couple of weeks, you punish the public by closing the parks and have your buddies in the media savage the Tea Party.  Send some of your bureaucrats out to tell everybody the sky is going to fall.  Meanwhile, the other senior leadership and I will fumble around not doing much until we can declare that the public pressure is too great and sensible people must step in to restore order and save the day.  Then we’ll give you a blank check to kick the can down the road for a few more months and we can all go back to the cocktail parties but without those pesky Tea Party types, who won’t have any clout so they won’t be invited. How’s that sound?”

Obama: “Yeah, okay.  Now kiss my ring and bow as you leave my presence.”

Joe Doakes

By outward appearances, that’s not too far off.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senate Republicans caved.  House leadership caved.  Rationale seems to be that if they don’t cave, people will say bad things about them.  And if Republicans don’t work with Democrats to pass laws Democrats want, then Democrats won’t work with Republicans to get laws Republicans want passed in the future.  We have to go along now to get along later.

In other words, okay, here, take my lunch money but don’t hit me.

No, you morons, Democrat will never go along with any Republican law, now or in the future.  And the media is going to say bad things about you no matter what you do.

You can’t buy your way into friendship with bullies, you have to kick their asses to generate some respect so you can begin to negotiate as equals.

Joe Doakes

It was a frustrating week indeed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Congressional Republicans gave John Boehner a standing ovation for caving in.

“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles. . . . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united,” [Eric Cantor] told them.

And apparently, we all agree we aren’t going to do shit about it.

Hooray for us!  Ribbons for everyone!  We are all winners!  Hooray!

Joe Doakes

If there was ever a time the GOP needed a strong leader – as opposed to a tactician – it was this past week.

Oh, well. There’ll be other epochal go/no-go moments…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama declares a National Day of Gloating

It’s true.  He basically did.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember Aesop’s fable about the country mouse and the city mouse?  I felt that way when I moved to Saint Paul.  Not because the buildings were strangely tall but because the residents were strangely liberal.

Years ago, I attended an out-state Republican Precinct Caucus in Senate District 16A represented by Republican Joe Niehaus, who came to the caucus and asked for our votes.  He promised that if we re-elected him, he’d go to St. Paul and vote NO.  If they ask to raise taxes, he’d vote NO.  If they ask for unilateral disarmament, he’d vote NO.  If they . . . by the time he finished, the whole crowd was yelling NO at every punch line and they meant every word of it.  Whatever it was, he was against it, and so were all of us.  Joe Niehaus was my kind of conservative because he understood that things which have stood the test of time should continue, government should do only what’s absolutely necessary and then at the lowest organizational level, and when you maximize personal responsibility, you maximize personal freedom to boot.

Years later, I attended a St. Paul Republican Precinct Caucus and sat between two people who would have been branded Commies had they been out-state.  The resolutions passed up to the county level were just as leftist as anything the out-state Democrats would have wanted.  I felt completely out of place at that meeting.  I was the only Joe Niehaus conservative there.

I’m getting that feeling again, watching senior Republican members of Congress congratulate themselves for caving in to Democrats.  They didn’t have to cave in, they didn’t have to do anything at all.  Just sit quietly until the default date appeared, call the President’s bluff, and wait for him to come to the bargaining table. How hard is that?  Just do . . . nothing.

I miss Joe Niehaus.  I wish he were a candidate in 2014 so we could send him to Washington solely to vote NO.  Now that’s a campaign I would donate to.

Joe Doakes

Sometimes “No” is the only answer you need.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Tom Cotton is one of the 87 Republicans who voted to cave.  He did it because he thought Obama would voluntarily default on the national debt which would plunge the world into economic chaos, and the main-steam media would blame it on Republicans.

In other words: Cotton believed Obama would shoot the hostage so Cotton paid the ransom But Let Obama Keep The Hostage!

The continuing resolution only kicks the can down the road for a few months.  Republicans can try to negotiate something in January.  I get that.

But here’s the thing about setting a precedent, Tommy Boy . . . .

That precedent was set decades ago. Even Reagan made some unconscionable compromises for reasons that seem dumb in retrospect (and to conservatives seemed dumb in 1987).

The challenge is in trying, at long last, to break it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park sends me stuff via email.  LOTS of it.  I’ve offered to just let him be one of the staff writers here, but no, Joe prefers the email thing.  I’m fine with that.

But he sends me a ton of great stuff.  I usually keep to posting one of Joe’s things a day – because I’d hate to have it seen that my blog is largely written by someone who maimls it in.  But he writes a lot of great stuff.

So today I’m going to try to catch up, just a little bit, and clear out some of my Doakes backlog.

Anyway – Joe emails:

I put up a new screen saver yesterday to honor Congress re-opening the government.  It’s a photo of a guy kicking a can down the road.  A co-worker said he’d rather see them kick the can down the road than see the can crushed.

I asked if he thought adding half-a-trillion dollars debt every year was bad.  No, not if we need to do it to get over the hump.  In times of crisis it’s okay to borrow, as we did in WW II.  Keynes, you know.

But if we add trillions more debt, even at 1 or 2 percent interest, debt service is going to mount up.  We already can’t pay down the existing debt, in fact, we can’t even make our current payroll without borrowing.  Eventually, we won’t be able to service the debt at all, right?  True.

So is he willing to cut programs to balance the budget?  No, we’re at bare bones already.  Am I willing to raise taxes?  No, I’m Taxed Enough Already.  So what’s his plan?

He figures that if he can kick the can down the road another 30-40 years, something will come up that will make it all better.

But he has kids aged 2 and 4.  Isn’t he sticking them with the prospect of a mountain of un-payable debt or a collapsing world economy?  Yes, but there’s nothing that can be done about that.  They’ll just have to work it out.

Honestly, I was stunned.  I gave up and walked away.  He is intentionally condemning his own children to savagery after the collapse of civilization because he isn’t willing to stop giving Obama-phones to lay-abouts.

Joe Doakes

We’re surrounded by them.