Earlier this week, the Joyce Foundation collected another installment on its payment for the MinnPost’s PR services in pursuit of disarming the American people – in this case, a “Community Voices” column by by Rebecca Lowen and Doug Rossinow, who are listed as “history professors at Metro State”.

Those who fail to learn from history, it’s fair to say, teach history at Metro State.

And if this reflects the current state of the victim-disarmament movement, it’d seem their strategy has shifted to “ad homina” and “making things up”.

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When the IRS scandal broke and Progressives were poo-pooing it, I said it wasn’t about mistakes or miscommunication but voter suppression.  The Obama Administration used the IRS to prevent conservatives from raising money to get their message out, so Romney lost the election.

Now there’s proof.

All that time Dog Gone was howling about voter suppression, she was engaging in one of your most famous laws.

I knew it.

Joe Doakes

Eventually everyone knows it.

Of all the gun-grabbing leaders of the victim disarmament movement, few have the history of loathsome hypocrisy of Diane Feinstein.

When she was mayor of San Francisco, she issued an executive order revoking all civilian carry permits…

…but had herself issued a police permit first.  Fearful over an incident that had happened on the campaign trail when her life was threatened, Feinstein figured her life was worth defending, and unlike all the sheeple she ruled, she was competent to do it.

She’s baaaaack; she wanted some “assault weapons” for one of her potemkin news conferences, and she exerted influence on DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who – according to emails acquired by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, got her subordinates to not only make it happen, but make it happen quietly:

Cmdr. Williams emailed Mr. Mentzer to put a “bug” in his ear that the police would “prefer that no mention of the fact that the weapons came from D.C. or were recovered by MPDC in the official language or speeches.” Mr. Mentzer replied, “By not mentioning where the weapons came from, we open ourselves up to the same charge against David Gregory.”

He was referring to the anchor of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” who knowingly procured an illegal 30-round magazine in the District as a stunt for his TV show, but was not charged.

The office of Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance W. Gainer coordinated bringing the illegal weapons onto Capitol Hill for Mrs. Feinstein’s dramatic Jan. 24 news conference introducing her new “assault weapons” ban.

This shutdown is showing a lot of regular Americans that laws are for peasants.  If you’re a Second Amendment advocate, you’ve known this for decades.

The peasants are running riot.

Minnesota has the 47th-best tax climate, according to the non-partisan [1] Tax Foundation.

In none of the five major categories – corporate, individual income, sales, unemployment or property taxes – is Minnesota even in the top 60%.

Keep up the good work, DFL!

[1] – Hey, if the media calls “Common Cause” “non-partisan”…

CORRECTION:  47th best.  Not 47th worst.  I needed coffee.

Vacationing senior citizens kept under armed guard in a hotel…

…to keep them from seeing all that shut-down federal land:

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route.

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm.

It’s time for Real Americans to get out and fight this banana-republic tyranny with the only weapon that matters (until November of 2014); mockery.

Which brings us to a question:  I’ve been looking for a federal monument in the Twin Cities area that’s been closed by the Feds, with an aim toward getting the biggest group of people I can, with the most cameras possible, to do some “civil disobedience”.

This weekend turned bad, naturally.

But I’m looking for a federal installation.  Ideally a monument, but a recreational area will also work.

Ideas?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Keith Ellison managed to get himself arrested, rallying for social justice and anti-racisss enlightened immigration open borders.

Where was my congressional representative, Betty McCollum? Why wasn’t she arrested?

Did she skip the rally?

Why does Betty McCollum hate brown people?

Joe Doakes

Not sure she does much of anything.

As “bullies” have become public enemy number one, a scourge being tackled by state legislatures, you might think that all of this frenzied activity would be affecting the incidence of bullying.

And you’d be right – but not in the way you’d suspect.  I’ll add some emphasis:

It started as a simple look at bullying. University of Texas at Arlington criminologist Seokjin Jeong analyzed data collected from 7,000 students from all 50 states.

He thought the results would be predictable and would show that anti-bullying programs curb bullying. Instead — he found the opposite.

Jeong said it was, “A very disappointing and a very surprising thing. Our anti-bullying programs, either intervention or prevention does not work.”

The study concluded that students at schools with anti-bullying programs might actually be more likely to become a victim of bullying. It also found that students at schools with no bullying programs were less likely to become victims.

The results were stunning for Jeong. “Usually people expect an anti-bullying program to have some impact — some positive impact.”

Politics is the worst possible way to allocate resources; it may be even worse for regulating behavior.

Rod Grams has passed away after a long battle with cancer. 

Son of a dairy farmer from Princeton, MN, Grams came up through broadcasting, working his way from small radio stations into the anchorman’s seat at Channel 9 by the mid-eighties. 

From there, he went into politics – defeating Gerry Sikorski, who was hobbled by a capitol banking scandal that showed the door to not a few Congresspeople that year. 

And in 1994, at the crest of the “Contract with America”, he took over Dave Durenberger’s Senate seat, after beating Ann Wynia by  squeaker in a race that showed both the nascent power of conservatives in the exceedingly moderate Minnesota Independent Republican party, and the rising power of the state’s Second Amendment lobby. 

His term in the Senate also was a barometer for the slide of the Twin Cities media into outright partisanship; the Twin Cities media lavished coverage on the twists and turns in Grams’ personal life, and breathless wall to wall scrutiny on the travails of Grams’ son Morgan – of whom Grams’ ex-wife had had full custody – in a way that they never quite managed to for DFLers. 

But it is an objective fact that Grams accomplished more in his six years in DC than the celebrated Paul Wellstone did in 12, or than Amy Klobuchar likely will in her entire career. 

After being defeated for re-election by future “Worst Senator in America” Mark Dayton in 2000, Grams went back to his first love, broadcasting; he owned a cluster of radio stations in Central Minnesota.  

I had the pleasure of interviewing Senator Grams two or three times on the NARN.  He had a broadcaster’s knack for being a great interview subject. 

I urge you to direct your prayers – or whatever your worldview calls for – to his family.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration’s effort to punish ordinary Americans until they agree to unlimited debt, continues.

 Catholic priests aren’t even allowed to volunteer to serve the troops.  Why not?  What’s it hurt?  Does this affect other religions, too?

 Families of soldiers in combat aren’t getting death benefits to attend funerals.  When did the military become “non-essential?”

 The feds closed everymemorial, monument, boat launch, permitted operator,scenic overlooks and evenparts of the ocean to ordinary Americans; except open border Liberals who get to hold their rally on The Mall.  Why am I not surprised?

 Joe Doakes

The founders’ vision of theirs country was “a free association of equals”.

Obama’s is “unruly children who need to be brought into line”.

Our government is doing its best to show you who serves who, here.

In a few years, the Chinese are going to be able to yank our nation’s chain and say “bark for your meal, bitch”.

Our state is run by bobbleheads, and the only pro sports team we have that isn’t a perennial embarassment is the WNBA team, which is itself a form of perennial embarassment.

But before you stick that .40 S&W in your mouth, just wait.

Because someone released the entire September 19, 1978 Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Capitol Theater in Passaic NJ concert – one of the greatest concerts ever recorded, ever, ever, in really really high quality audio.

All three hours and 55 minutes of it.

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A few weeks ago, I pointed out that not only does the MinnPost appear to be selling news to the highest bidder (or, more accurately, biggest contributor), but that MPR News appears to have done the same.

The Usual Bona Fides:  Let me give you my usual disclaimer; I’ve always – or at least for the last ten years or so – believed that MPR News made a fairly credible effort at appearing, from an institutional level, to be fairly balanced and to keep its individual staffers’ biases firewalled away pretty well.   I know some people at MPR News, and I believe they operate with a level of integrity (although some of them also believe they’re above criticism by the hoi polloi; after I asked questions about MPR News’ “Poligraph” segment’s oddly incurious coverage of the Betty McCollum/Tony Hernandez debates, I got an email from a senior MPR News exec to Catherine Richert advising her “not to engage with that guy”.  He’d fumble-fingered and sent it to me, too).

All that aside, I’ve always believed MPR News – the news department, as opposed to NPR, or non-news programming, like Garrison Keillor – does an adequate job of compartmentalizing bias.

Or I did, until fairly recently.

The Shakedown We Pay For:  As noted above, I wonder why MPR News is covering Second Amendment issues under the direct sponsorship of the Joyce Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of gun-grabber organizations.

Bill Glahn covers some of the same ground in a piece about MPR’s “Daily Current” show, hosted by the bias-sodden Keri Miller.  The “Daily Current”, a look at their website notes, is a production of MPR News.

The hour was hosted by MPR’s Kerri Miller. Panelists included Denise Cardinal, the founder of Alliance for a Better Minnesota (ABM), Ben Golnik, a political consultant, and Kathryn Pearson, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.

Cardinal is, of course, a major liberal mover and shaker and, as Glahn points out and I reported endlessly in 2010, architect of Alida Messinger’s epic, toxic sleaze campaign in 2010, which bought Mark Dayton barely enough votes to win.  Golnik is a fixture in MN GOP politics.  Pearson is Larry Jacobs’ understudy and contender for his title of “most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media”.

 Let’s turn to MPR’s Kerri Miller for a moment.  As the show’s host and moderator, her chief means of controlling the narrative are by asking questions and controlling the show’s flow…As for flow, by my count, Miller interrupts the Republican Golnik at total of thirteen 13 times.  During one 56-second stretch alone [08:26 to 09:22] MPR’s Miller interrupts Golnik seven times to challenge his facts.

Not only do such constant interruptions throw off a guest’s rhythm, they telegraph to the audience that the “neutral” host believes the guest to be untrustworthy or evasive.

On the rare occasions Miller speaks during Cardinal’s or Pearson’s time, she never interrupts and stops the flow.  Rather, Miller will say a word or two to clarify or to reinforce a point—never to challenge or dispute—as can be heard at the 17:47 mark with Cardinal and the 25:52 mark with Pearson.

I urge you to try to find the recordings of Miller’s performance in the 2010 Governor’s race.  I listened to both interviews, and wrote about ’em back then.   Her interview of Tom Emmer was harsh, acerbic, combative, laced with hostile interruptions.

Which is fine – journalists should ask questions, right?

But in contrast, her conversation with Mark Dayton was chummy, clubby, a rhetorical warm fuzzy blanket with camomile tea.  It sounded like they may have been painting each others’ toenails.

Miller hasn’t changed much.

Conflict Of Interest:  But here’s the part I wanted to draw your attention to; I’ll add emphasis:

The host’s interruptions of the token conservative are not just to challenge facts or opinion.  On two occasions, MPR’s Miller interrupts Republican Golnik to defend Democrat Governor Dayton—on the Vikings Stadium [30:22] and on MPR News’ sponsorMNsure [32:15].

Her defense of the Democrat Dayton during that latter exchange reveals volumes about the host and the outlet.  While the disastrous debut of Obamacare was makinginternational news, and the problems with the local MNsure rollout again on the front pages, Miller dismisses the problems with her corporate sponsor as mere “glitches.”

Her defense of our liberal Governor is so over the top that she has to catch herself at one point [32:42 mark] with the walk back “not to speak for the Governor here,” played to laughter from the panelists.

That Miller is a shill for the DFL is not up for question by anyone paying attention.

That MPR News is taking money to produce the news is one thing; all commercial news operations have to work to create the impression there’s a high, thick wall between the money and news sides of their operations.

That MPR News is not only having its news coverage directly sponsored by advocacy groups, but is having its non-news, opinion programming – Miller’s show – sponsored by the government that MPR News is supposed to be covering?

How is this not merely a conflict of interest, but an undercutting of the integrity of a news operation that has always publicly wrapped itself in the flag of journalistic ethics (whatever they are?)

Tom Scheck?  Mike Mulcahy?  Rupa Chinoy?  Bob Collins?  Anyone?

Anyone?

When your liberal friends, or even your less-informed Republican friends start yapping about the imperative to hike the debt limit, have them read this.  It’s John Hinderaker, and it points out that the government doesn’t constitutionally have the option to default:

So what will actually happen if Congress doesn’t increase the debt ceiling by approximately October 17? The government’s debt obligations will be paid, but reductions in other spending will start to become necessary. In effect, leaving the debt ceiling as is would function as a spending cut. This is why the Democrats hate the idea so much. They know there is zero chance of default, but they are horrified at the prospect that voters and taxpayers may find out that there is a relatively simple way to bring about spending reductions that would create, in effect, a balanced budget. Hence the hysteria.

And hence the ratcheting rhetoric.

Look for a racial angle any day now.

A friend of mine emailed:

A friend of mine sent this to me today while vacationing near White Mountain National Forest in Vermont.

By the way if you want to visit a federal open air sculpture garden that is still open, you can’t go to the national Korean War memorial. But you can to the the front of the U.S. Courthouse in Minneapolis and have your picture taken by the cute little animals sculpted there. So why is that open but not the open air Korean War memorial. Is the sculpture garden in front of the courthouse more necessary? Just a thought.

I’m gonna guess if we organized a “cute little federal animals tour” with a couple hundred people, we’d see barricades.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

What do these have in common:  My Lai massacre;Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse;  Fast and Furious gun running to Mexico;  IRS harassment of conservatives; Mount Rushmore shut down.

Tone from the top.

Everybody who deals with a giant organization knows what issues management is focused on, and what issues management doesn’t care about.  You might get by doing as little as 15 minutes of useful work in any given week; but God help you if you forget to submit your TPS report.  The rental housing inspector doesn’t care if the ceiling is falling down as long as the window latches work.

Nobody got orders to commit a massacre. They didn’t need no stinking orders.  They knew what management wanted, without being told.  That’s why leadership matters, to set the right tone so subordinates do the right thing without being told.

That’s why The Empty Chair is such a problem.

Joe Doakes

I also think it’s basic human behavior in organizations; absent authority, the best and worst in the employees comes out.

Unfortunately, with government, “the best” is “no harm is done”, which is what’s supposed to happen anyway; it doesn’t make headlines.

And the worst?  Well, that doesn’t make headlines either – provided a Democrat is in office.

But you get what I’m saying.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my various liberal lawyer friends, it’s this; when I see news of the filing of an absurd lawsuit demanding a bizarre amount of money for an insane claim, take a step back and a deep breath.  A filing does not equal a judgment; while the occasional batspittle-crazy judgment happens, the vast majority of bizarre lawsuits end in a dismissal on summary judgment; a judge determines that no actual matters of law are involved, so there’s no need for a trial. 

And the bizarre cases that appeared in a splash of laughter and anger disappear, unlamented and

Over the weekend, the word got out among the usual circles about a Swiss proposal to give every single citizen a $2,600 monthly government-paid income. 

There were two reactions from among Americans I’d broadly call “conservative”; mockery, and a little bit of head-scratching.

We’ll look into the head-scratching first. 

The Big Fix: In his classic book Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Rourke noted that if we just gave the money we currently spend on social welfare to people whose income is below the poverty line, we could bring every person in the United States up to the poverty line, and save money.  We’d do something that eighty years of “progressive” social policy has “tried” and failed to do; eradicate poverty, at least in a literal, personal-financial sense. 

The Swiss “plan” – assuming it also involved eliminating other poverty entitlement programs – might be a huge step toward simplifying poverty entitlements and, perversely, saving money…

The Swiss Reality– …if there were the slightest chance of it becoming law.

The Swiss federal system allows the National Assembly – the Swiss parliament – to refer bills dealing with major government issues – taxes, spending and big policy issues – to a national vote, very, very easily. 

Switzerland, like Minnesota, is starkly divided along what we’d call “red/blue” lines; the big cities, Zürich and Basel and Geneva, are every bit as clogged with socialist bobbleheads as Minneapolis or Duluth.  But the cantons (states) of greater Switzerland tend to be very conservative. The largest party in the National Assembly is the “Swiss People’s Party” (Scheweizerische Volkspartei, or SVP in German), a center-right party that, unlike many European “conservative” parties, could be recognized as “conservative” by an American Tea Partier. The SVP leads a coalition of center and right-leaning parties that don’t quite have a majority of the Parliament – 94 out of 200 seats in the lower house – but would require absolute unity among their opposition to effectively beat. 

But this isn’t even a parliamentary referendum.  Swiss law allows citizen petitions with 100,000 signatures – out of a population of 8 million citizens, or roughly 2% of the voting population – to force a referendum.

Andthatis how this proposal got on the ballot. 

On the one hand, it allows well-organized grass-roots groups to make a big electoral splash by getting the darnedest hare-brained ideas onto the national ballot. 

On the other?  They almost always get beaten.  A “grassroots” group of Swiss got an initiative to abolish the Swiss military onto the ballot in 2011.  It got a slew of headlines.

And it lost by about a 3:1 margin. 

The election of Jesse Ventura shows that if times are good enough, you can get up to 37% of any population to suspend their good judgement on a lark, when they don’t think it matters that much.

But here, we’re talking money.

This initiative is going to generate a lot of headlines, and a fair amount of mockery from American, left and right, who don’t get how Swiss democracy works…

…and, soon, a 2:1 electoral defeat.

Exhibit A:

Glad we could clarify that.

Last Friday, the income tax celebrated its 100th birthday. 

John Fund “celebrates” the birthday:

Critics warned a century ago that the new tax would ultimately be ruinous. The income tax “will tax the honest and allow the dishonest to escape,” the New York Times wrote.

That’s right; a century ago, the New York Times stood against big, rapacious government.

“Even those who approve the tax despite its faults cannot contend that the same sums could not have been raised more certainly, more equitably, and with less trouble to both payers and collectors by a stamp tax.” The Times warned that in any emergency the tax rates would be sure to rise and that “its unpopularity will grow with its life.”

Since then, with rare exceptions, the income tax has grown like Topsy, fueled in large part by the kinds of emergencies the Times worried about. As journalist David Van Edema put it: “The government, using Americans’ sense of patriotism and duty, [has] found new excuses to not only raise taxes, but widen the range of who would pay for them, and how.”

While critics will note that America was not a perfectly libertarian country before October 4, 1913 – slavery was certainly a blot on that particular escutcheon – it’s hard to explain to  modern Americans that up until the early 1900s, Civil War aside, the federal government paid for itself with import duties and taxes on alcohol, tobacco and the like. 

And along with the skinny government went skinny federal ambitions, and skinnier government control over the lives of Joe and Jane Citizen. 

To someone whose entire frame of reference involves looking at pay stubs and seeing money siphoned off to pay for other peoples’ mortgage insurance and farm subsidies and pensions and goodness knows whatever other crap that generations of politicians felt was more important than my own plans for the money, it seems incredible.  Almost incomprehensible.  Few of us can imagine anything else.

Which is what makes it so diabolical.

President Obama, apparently afraid that government can’t perform its essential law enforcement functions while operating at only 83 percent strength, has shut down the Amber Alert website. 

But not Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” site.

Priorities.

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 in the studio today from 1-3.  I’ll be talking later in the show with my former longtime co-host, Ed Morrissey, about the shutdown and whatever else pops up.
• 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 six 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.
• 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!

Tomorrow on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, I’ll have my former long-time co-host Ed Morrissey back on the show.  We’ll be talking shutdown, debt ceiling, and the whole Federal works. 

Tune in from 1-3PM tomorrow on AM1280 The Patriot!

Generally, whenever a lefty says “it’s time for a conversation about guns”, they mean “conversation” in the same sense that the crazy guy in the back of the bus means it; they talk (at full bellow), you shut up and listen.

Anthony Bourdain, of all people, sounds off with a useful contribution, by way of some notes about an upcoming episode of one of his foodie shows:

I suspect what people are going to talk about when they see our New Mexico episode is the sight of me; socialist sympathizer, leftie, liberal New Yorker, gleefully hammering away with an AR-15, an instrument of mayhem and loathing that also has the distinction of being America’s favorite weapon.

I like guns.

His next lunch in TriBeCa is going to be interesting.

But he carries on:

I like shooting them. I like holding their sleek, heavy, deadly weight in my hands. I like shooting at targets: cans, paper cut-outs, and—even though I’m not a hunter—the occasional animal. Though I do not own a gun—I would, if I lived in a rural area like, say…Montana—consider owning one.

And – this is really unusual – he actually holds up both ends of the conversation, from the perspective he already admitted to:

 Whatever my feelings about gun regulation—and my worries, as a father, about what kind of world my daughter will have to live in, I think I should have as many guns as I like. Even Ted Nugent should have guns. He likes them a lot. They make him happy—and as offensive as I may find a lot of what comes out of his mouth, I’m pretty sure, based on first hand experience, that he’s a responsible gun owner.

You, however, I’m not so sure about. And my next door neighbor. I’m not so sure about him either.

 He wants background checks.  As do, I’ll point out, not a few gunnies – who do you think supported the current NICS system, anyway? – provided it doesn’t turn into a tool for the world’s Michael Bloombergs to use against us.

But Bourdain notes exactly why it’s so hard to actually have the “conversation”:

The conversation so far has illuminated, instead of any substantial issues, mostly the huge cultural divide between those like me who live in coastal cities with restrictive gun laws—and that vast swath of America who live very differently. We don’t understand how they live. And they don’t understand how we could POSSIBLY live the way we live. A little respect for that difference might be a good thing. The contempt, mockery and total lack of understanding for all those people “out there” by deep thinkers and pundits who’ve never sat down for a cold beer in a bar full of camo-wearing duck hunters is both despicable and counterproductive. We are too busy expressing disbelief at the ways others have chosen to live to ever really talk about the nuts and bolts of making America safer and less violent.

No middle ground is possible when even the notion of a sane, reasonable person who likes to shoot lots of bullets at stuff is seen as so foreign—so “other”. Maybe we would be better off– safer, kinder to one another if we were Denmark or Sweden.

But we are not.

It’s worth a read.

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

The Capitol Shooting story is looking less heroic and more like a blunder. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence she was a threat, only that she panicked when she turned into the wrong driveway.

Might make a good opening sequence for an action/thriller movie.

Black, single mother, divorced from abusive spouse, lives in Maryland but commutes to work in D.C. for some government agency. Walking down the corridor, she hears raised voices. Her boss, a nice Latina woman, is being given orders by a flabby middle-aged White man in a wrinkled suit. He demands she harass the administration’s political opponents, a group of Black, lesbian, abused, single mothers called BLAM, or he’ll have Social Services take her kids away.

The man sees a shadow, realizes he has an eavesdropper, gives chase. She runs out of the building. She wants to blow the whistle to higher authorities but her cell phone rings – her kid at daycare has a fever and they insist she pick up the kid immediately. She gets the kid in the car and heads for the FBI to report the crime but D.C. traffic is a nightmare because of the shut-down, streets closed, veterans in wheelchairs protesting at a monument. She turns into the wrong driveway by mistake, the cops yell and draw their guns. She’s afraid they are after her because of what she overheard, panics, drives off, is chased down and shot dead by half-a-dozen Capitol Security cops. Her child is left crying by the side of the road.

A brave investigative journalist decides to take on the Administration to get justice for the child. This is her story. Coming soon to a theatre near you.

I was thinking Julia Roberts for the lead but since you have such a close, personal relationship with Scarlett Johansson, I thought maybe you two could do lunch and work it out. Have your people call hers, won’t you?

Joe Doakes

I’m on it.

NPR News this morning:

The officers who shot the woman at the Capitol are among the hundreds of thousands of government employees not being paid…

Tax money well spent.

UPDATE:  This was just  flip little thing I’d toss off onto the blog while I was sitting at a stoplight on my way to work. 

But the whole “federal cops are unpaid!” bit not only seems to be a coordinated bit of lefty narrative…

…but it’s completely wrong. 

So apparently the “top flight journalists” at National Public Radio are reporting lefty twitter-cant as fact, now.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

National Review’s original mission statement, from 1955. Skip down to the enumerated points, they’re outstanding and still relevant.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223549/our-mission-statement/william-f-buckley-jr#!

My buddy points out Buckley’s doomsday talk is outdated: it’s been surpassed. Rather than leftists being nominated for awards for blaming conservatives, they actually receive the Nobel for simply winning the election. They don’t even need to even complete the narrative anymore.

Joe Doakes