The media, especially NPR, ran wall-to-wall coverage of the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre over the weekend.

The media paraded bereaved parents before the media, as scholars and journalists and talking heads furrowed their brows and clucked in the way that they’ve become accustomed to clucking about the whole thing.

As a parent, I can relate.  Seeing peoples’ children being murdered is the mother of all gut-checks.  It’s impossible not to feel that overwhelming flood of parental dread, a wave of human compassion, and a twinge “there but for the grace of God…” at stories like that.

But I noticed something absent in any of the mainstream media’s coverage of “gun violence” over the past year-and-almost-a-week; while the media has spent countless hours memorializing the children of Newtown, we’ve seen scarcely a word about the children murdered in Chicago – the crown jewel of American gun control, and the community controlled by the pals of the current administration.

In 2013 – which roughly corresponds to the year since Newtown – there’ve been 395 murders in Chicago.  The toll is remarkable in that it is marginally a little lower than some previous years, but still a mind-numbing carnage.

And of those 395 murders, nine were of children under 12 years old.  And 40 more were of people from 13-17 years old.

Counting everyone?  That’s 16 Sandy Hook classrooms worth of carnage among children over the past year.

But the victims rated not a single day of national garment-rending.  Scarcely an askance mention on National Public Radio.

Why?

Because they had the misfortune to be murdered in a city that is completely strangleheld by Democrats?

Or because none of them look like the children of NPR executives or “Protect” Minnesota leaders?

I was going to write about the case of Army Lt. Colonel Robert Bateman, who’s become a bit of a mini-celebrity on the left for coming out espousing a very draconian raft of gun control laws.

But Joe Doakes beat me to it, and did it with style.

Joe’s piece is below the jump.

(more…)

Here’s the link for the Minnesota Military Appreciation Fund.

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 with Senator Dave Osmek about the DFL’s next round of budget hijinx.  Also SPC Kristopher Francisco, Afgan war vet, talking about the Minnesota Military Appreciation Fund (MMAF).
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(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!

Some guys grew up fantasizing about the car they wanted, someday.

For others, it was the gun, the girl, the guitar.

I did all of those, naturally (’67 Mustang, HK91, Marisa Tomei, 1959 Les Paul Standard).

But above all?  When I was a kid – and not so much a kid – I used to fantasize about the band I’d have someday.

Usually, the dream focused on some combination of two guitars, keyboards, bass and drums.  Nice and flexible, allows for all sorts of combinations of guitar sounds.  Sorta like Tom Petty and the classic Heartbreakers (here with an added sax player and background singer, which I’d also dig):

Of course, through much of the eighties – and (koff) the nineties, I thought it’d be fun to have something a little bigger, less garage-y, frighteningly tight, and danceable.

Like INXS:

Although that’d mean recruiting someone else to sing. And lead singers are a pain.

At various times, I’ve thought “screw it – I’m gonna go full Stax/Volt”:

And truth be told, that’s where I’m at right now; a band that is something like the classic Asbury Jukes lineup, complete with the horn section.

But then I remember all the crap that goes into keeping all the personalities in even a four piece band together, and I think “screw it; I’ll do a power trio”:

Of course, as always, I’ll stick with “whatever I can find”.

Er, when I start another band…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

City of St. Paul takes responsibility for street plowing the way Obama’s IRS does – proclaim outrage, shuffle people around, make vague promises and hope the issue goes away.

A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and plow the streets.  Since I moved here in 1998, streets have been a cruel insult.

Comparing St. Paul to Minneapolis sounds fair – both big cities with huge staff and monster budgets – but a better comparison is Roseville or Falcon Heights – a small city with small staff and small budget whose streets are plowed and sanded, clean and dry, weeks before St. Paul’s streets are done.  If the little town can do it with tiny staff working for peanuts, why can’t giant St. Paul do it with all its union employees and LGA resources?

I suspect Mayor Chris Coleman doesn’t want to discuss the solution proven to work:  contract it out.  I vaguely recall the City did for a while back in the early 90’s – maybe during Mayor Norm Coleman’s time?  I think they contracted to heavy equipment companies that did road construction in the Summer but sat idle all Winter.  We could hire them again.

I want to say it was West or South Saint Paul, or maybe a trial program on the West Side.  The city’s union employees claimed, unsurprisingly, that the private contractors were terrible at the job, and the program was ended.  “Cauterized” might be a better term.

Plus, St. Paul never plows alleys – residents band together to hire some guy with a Western plow on his pickup, which is good Winter work for landscapers.  They could each clean a few streets, too, and have them perfectly clean before the city crews even get to the shop.

A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a plow on every block: now there’s a campaign slogan I could love.

That’s my block; one of our neighbors does plowing.  We each chip in $20 a winter – and he has to keep the alley plowed to get to work.  I think during the big blizzard in 2010 he may have made one of the side streets passable too…

  When I bought my last vehicle, I went shopping for a 4-wheel drive.  My in-laws asked me “Why do you need a 4-wheel drive, you live in St. Paul?” and I replied “I need a 4-wheel drive BECAUSE I live in St. Paul.”  Now that’s pathetic.

Joe Doakes

Saint Paul seems to be getting counterintuitively worse at clearing roads.  While last year was the worst – with even high-traffic streets remaining impassible sheets of glare ice for days after big storms – we haven’t had a real donnybrook of a storm yet, either.

The roads, even after last week’s modest storm, are like goat paths in the Bolivian Andes.

To:  Governor Dayton
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:   Remember all those pieces of paper you signed last spring?

Governor Dayton:

Yesterday, you told MPR News in re the new $90 million Senate Palace that Tom Bakk rammed through at the literal last possible moment of the last session…:

“I think the building itself is necessary … We’re talking about a project for the next century,” Dayton told reporters Wednesday. “But I think the price tag on it, and appearance of it, are a little high.”

Er, Governor Dayton?  You signed the appropriation into law.

Or at least we presume it was you, and not Carrie Lucking moving your hands.

That presumption looks weaker and weaker these days.

Dayton said he wants a more modest, less expensive version and planned to share his concerns soon with Senate leaders…The new building is needed to make up for the square footage lawmakers will lose once the renovation of the Capitol is complete, Bakk added. Under present Senate arrangements, the majority party is housed in the Capitol while the minority is housed in the State Office Building. Bringing Democrats and Republicans together under one roof is important, Bakk said.

Here’s a solution.  Mere blocks from the Capitol lies downtown Saint Paul.  It’s got a 30% vacancy rate – and I suspect that’s even higher in the gulch between Cedar and Jackson streets, where there is virtually nothing living (thanks, largely, to DFL policies).

Why not move the Senate into the old USBank building?  Or 375 Jackson?  The Hamm?   Alliance?  The Big Red One?

Or maybe Macy’s?   That’d seem…appropriate.

PS to Governor Dayton:  Nancy Pelosi was being just a little bit flippant, I think, when she said “you have to pass it to see what’s in it”.  It technically is your job to know what you’re signing into law.

In re the story about the six year old boy, Hunter Yelton, who was suspended from school and branded a “sexual harasser” for kissing another six year old girl:  the mother is going public saying that it was perfectly legitimate.

And I’ll allow that there are two sides to every story.

But if you bet money that the woman would have a hyphenated last name, and be a part of the educational-industrial complex, you may cash your chips.

(PS:  kids experiment with the idea of “affection” at that age.  They need to be firmly but gently set straight on what is and is not appropriate – not have their age-normal explorations branded a crime.  Some therapist is going to get rich off that poor kid when he’s gotta deal with his relationship issues someday).

To:  Liberals Who Pretend To Care About The Military when Veterans Benefits Are Threatened
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Put Up

All,

You know who you are.  You’re the liberals who screech like worn-out brake calipers when conservative political actions even obliquely threaten military or veterans benefits (which liberals barber about because it’s the one part of the military that’s the most like a social program).

So by all means, lefties; it’s time for you to screech.  Let your inner stuck cat howl like Jimi Hendrix’ Strat turned to 11.

That is all.

Do you remember the puddles of smug joy that the clacque of jabbering Ivy League frat-boy buffoons and sorority-sister buffoonettes that run our governent squirted when they signed Obamacare?

Byron York sure does – and he documents the descent from the End-Zone Happy Dance of March 2010 to the paranoid catatonia in the West Wing today:

[The] Democrats who gathered in the East Room of the White House for the signing ceremony could barely contain their joy. They cheered, they laughed, they shouted, they pumped their fists, they wouldn’t sit down. They chanted “Fired up — ready to go!” as they had at Obama campaign rallies. When the president recognized Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, the chant turned to “Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!”

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Pelosi, of course, would be swept out of the speakership in the Republican landslide a few months later — a result that was based, in part, on the voters’ unhappiness with Obamacare. And today, some of the other Democrats in the East Room are now afraid for their jobs — because of the voters’ unhappiness with Obamacare.

After an effusive introduction from Vice President Biden, Obama turned almost immediately to the task ahead. “It will take four years to implement fully many of these reforms,” he said, “because we need to implement them responsibly. We need to get this right.”

At the time, no one had any idea just how ill-prepared Obama and his administration were to actually do the job they set for themselves. Three years later, approaching an Oct. 1, 2013, deadline for the establishment of the Obamacare exchanges, the administration was still scrambling to finish even the most basic tasks. What followed was disaster.

Read the whole thing.

Show it to your friends who are losing their coverage.

Let them get angry.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My three-year-old granddaughter wanted a sucker. I said “No, you can’t eat a sucker in the car, you’ll make a mess.” She said “I won’t eat it, I just want to hold it.” Okay, fine, you can hold it.

Next thing I know, it’s unwrapped. “You’re not supposed to eat that.” “I’m not eating it, I just want to smell it.”

Pretty soon, her tongue is blue. “You’re not supposed to eat that.” “I’m not eating it, I only had one lick.”

Next thing I know, her face and hands are sticky, her coat is sticky, the car-seat is sticky and the sucker is stuck to the carpet on the floor. “I told you not to eat that, now look what you’ve done, you’ve made a mess.”

“It was an accident.”

Sure, it was a totally predictable outcome and any sensible person should have seen it coming. I never should have given in to her demand in the first place, I should have taken the sucker and let her wail and cry about it. That’s not the part that puzzles me.

What I want to know is: how did she manage to teach her technique to the Iranians so they could outwit John Kerry and Barak Obama, without me knowing about it?

Joe Doakes

Or did Kerry learn it from Jimmy Carter, who learned it from some other grandchild 35 years ago?

…of Cindy Yuille and Steven Forsythe, who were murdered a year ago at this minute (3:25PM Pacific Time) in the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Portland, Oregon by Jacob Tyler Roberts, an insane, delusional narcissist…

…and the many, perhaps dozens, of people whom Roberts couldn’t murder in the ensuing minutes and hours, because Nick Meli – a citizen with a carry permit and a .40 cal Glock 22 – made Roberts stop short, and then end his shooting spree by killing himself.  (We talked about  it yesterday). 

If you see Representative Heather Martens, Jane Kay, their PR flak Doug Grow, Michael Paymar, Alice Hausman or any of the Twin Cities’ other gun grabbers, please do me a favor and remind them – Nick Meli saved more lives in that moment than they and their groups of smug, sanctimonious, sputtering hamsters ever will.

…but this actually sums up the whole video game thing pretty well.

I almost missed this one in the scrum of this past few weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, when Representatives Paymar and Martens tried to jam down a ban on law-abiding citizens carrying their legally-permitted firearms in the Capitol complex, the Strib’s Abby Simons wrote the paper’s follow-up piece.

It ended with a quote from Representative Martens; like most of Martens’ statements, it reeks of crap from rhetorical stem to stern.  But I’ll emphasize the part I want to focus on today:

Heather Martens, executive director [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] of Protect Minnesota, an organization geared toward ending gun violence [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] and an advocate for the ban, said the intimidation happens when a loaded firearm is worn openly, as it was earlier this year during a hearing.

“There is no history of someone like that being a meaningful deterrent or being able to stop an attack,” she said.

If you read this blog,  you are smarter than that. 

John Lott showed how “someone like that” – multiplied by millions – have deterred hundreds of thousands of crimes in shall-issue states, as compared with discretionary or non-issue states (back when there were more of both). 

As to stopping those attacks?  Well, we’ve been through this before.  Here’s a partial list of attacks stopped by law-abiding, non-police, private citizens with legal firearms:

• The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, where a teacher grabbed a gun and stopped the two shooters.
• The Appalachian Law School shooting, where a would-be mass-murderer was stopped by a couple of armed students.
• A robbery that was devolving into a mass-shooting in Virginia was stopped by a CCW permittee.
• This episode in Texas recently
• An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
• The New Life Church shooting spree in Colorado Springs in 2007, ended by Jeanne Assam.
• This episode in Texas, where an armed man killed a mass shooter (and died, himself); it’s generally agreed he saved several lives in the process.
• An unknown “good samaritan” in South Minneapolis prevented himself from being murdered, two years ago. 
• A bouncer in Minneapolis prevented himself, and very possibly a number of other people, from being carved up like Christmas hams a few years ago. 
• Details are still sketchy, but it’s very likely one “VT” of Saint Paul prevented a murder – his – and possibly his friend’s a few weeks ago. 

If Heather Martens – or any of her supporters and employees – are talking, the rule of thumb is “assume they’re lying”.  Because they are.

To: Roger Goodell, President, The National Football League
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  It’s Apparently Not ThePlayers

Mr. Goodell,

You run a tax-exempt “non-profit” that is the biggest license to print money in the United States.

Your organization regularly loots city and state treasuries to build your venues – including mine.  You’ve crudely extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from our idiot governor and from a bunch of legislators who should have known better, using tactics that well befit the mobsters that are among the main beneficiaries of your profits.

Your athletes have turned, over the past thirty years, from role models into reprobates.

But you turned down this Super Bowl ad, from Daniel Firearms?

(To whom I’ll be giving free advertising, today and on Super Sunday, and likely more than a time or two in between)

I’m picturing the reasons.

Because you’re worried about violence:  So are we.  Especially when I go into a bar or restaurant where there might be NFL players present. (Yep, I used to DJ at the old Eddie Websters.  To be fair, back then the biggest danger was being on the same stretch of road as a Viking after closing time).

Because you’re worried about the game’s image:  Right.  Hey, is that Miley Cyrus’ ass at the halftime show?

Because you’re in bed with a bunch of liberal metro-area politicians:  Oh.  Right.

I think you might just be creating some baseball fans out there.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Put up the Christmas tree last weekend.  Some ornaments never go out of style.

Joe Doakes

Heh.

This coming Saturday, Minnesota’s self-appointed gun-grabber elite are going to try to squeedge some more juice out of waving the bloody shirt of Newtown:  

To Remember: A commemoration of the Sandy Hook school victims, and all victims of gun violence — 9:30 a.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 1200 Marquette Ave., Minneapolis. To RSVP, click here. Space is limited. This event is co-sponsored by Moms Demand Action, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Organizing for Action.

They’ll then attempt to hold a meeting to promote more laws that would have had no effect on Newtown, or any other real-world gun violence. 

But there’s another anniversary this coming week; tomorrow, in fact.  And it deserves a memorial – because unlike every single thing proposed by “Protect” MN, Moms Want Action and the Felon Mayors, it actually saved lives. 

At around 3:25PM on December 11, 2012, Jacob Tyler Roberts walked into the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Portland Oregon.  He was wearing a ski mask, and carrying a stolen AR-15-pattern rifle with five magazines, a total of 150 rounds.  He donned the ski mask and carried the rifle openly; witnesses apparently thought it was a paintball outfit, and that the rifle was a toy.  One woman reportedly told Roberts to take off the mask – it looked “Creepy”.  Roberts didn’t respond. 

He walked to atrium in the middle of the mall, and started shooting.  He fired off his first magazine, killing two – Cindy Yuille, a 54 year old hospice nurse, and Steven Forsythe, a youth sports coach – and hitting15 year old Kristina Shevchenko in the chest (Shevchenko managed to walk out of the mall, and survived the incident). 

Then, as Roberts turned a corner and reloaded, he ran into Nick Meli, a citizen with a .40 caliber Glock 22 and an Oregon carry permit.  Meli drew – but didn’t shoot.  According to some stories, Meli froze; in others, he saw that there were civilians in the background that would be in danger if he missed.  Either is a fairly normal response under such conditions. 

But Roberts ran away.  He ducked into a JC Penney and ran into a storage corridor, where he pointed his rifle at Penneys employee Rok Sang Kim – but turned, ran down a stairwell, and shot himself. 

Drawn by reports of a mass shooting, dozens of ambulances turned out – but only Shevchenko was treated for any injuries.

The Lesson:  After the Columbine shooting – where a SWAT team waited outside the school for four hours before moving to engage the shooters – law enforcement went on a crash course of learning how to deal with mass shooters.  The lesson learned?  Don’t wait.  Get in, get at the shooter. 

It wasn’t about testosterone; examination of mass shooters showed that most of them are deeply narcissistic and intensely delusional.  In almost every case, the shootings were planned to a fine sheen, like a military operation, if the military were run by delusional people.

And that while the plans were intricate, the shooters’ mental state meant that any serious hiccup to the plan would send them off the rails.  And by “serious hiccup”, they meant “someone putting up meaningful resistance”. 

And so cops changed their tactics; rather than wait for SWAT, cops are now trained to get in, find the shooter, and put some lead on the target.   Because nothing disrupts a lunatic’s plan like having lead sailing past your head (to say nothing of through one’s chest). 

But here’s the little secret; it doesn’t have to be a cop doing the resisting.  History is full of examples of individual citizens putting up armed resistance to mass shooters, and ending the shootings:

• The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, where a teacher grabbed a gun and stopped the two shooters.
• The Appalachian Law School shooting, where a would-be mass-murderer was stopped by a couple of armed students.
• A robbery that was devolving into a mass-shooting in Virginia was stopped by a CCW permittee.
• This episode in Texas recently
• An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
• The New Life Church shooting spree in Colorado Springs in 2007, ended by Jeanne Assam.
• This episode in Texas, where an armed man killed a mass shooter (and died, himself); it’s generally agreed he saved several lives in the process.
• Columbine itself was part of the lesson; it’s generally agreed that an armed sheriff’s deputy derailed the greater part of Harris and Klebold’s plans, firing off a couple of shots and deflecting the two shooters back to the library, fouling up their plans to set off bombs throughout the building and perhaps kill many, many more people. 

And of course the the Clackamas Mall shooting. 

Second-Guesses: There are those in the gun-grab movement who try to minimize, discount and ridicule the effect that an armed citizen can have in a mass shooting.  Some scoff that Roberts, and the shooter in the Colorado Springs episode, had jammed guns – as if clearing a jam is anything unusual (especially in an AR15) much less time-consuming to fix. 

But in both shootings, the jam was accompanied by a citizen facing the shooter down (and in Colorado Springs, seriously wounding him). 

The underlying point – mass shooters tend to abandon their plans when they’re faced with active, armed, potentially lethal resistance – stands.  Passive resistance – “lockdowns”, kevlar whiteboards – are better than nothing, provided the mass shooter allows them to be better than nothing. 

Consequences, Intended And Otherwise:  The Gun Control “Gun Safety” movement yaps a lot about “preventing gun violence” – while pushing policies that have never prevented and shall never prevent a single crime. 

And yet a year ago tomorrow, Nick Meli likely saved more lived that all of Michael Bloomberg, the Joyce Foundation, and Rep. Heather Martens’ efforts likely ever will, ever, for all eternity. 

And so for that, we should pay homage at 3:25PM tomorrow.

So according to a number of lawsuits working their way through the system right now, it’s OK to force bakers, florists, photographers and other such “creative” vendors who happen to be fundamentalist Christians to serve same-sex customers, on pain of being sued back to the stone age.

Very well.  By the same token…:

• A Jewish tattoo artist has no legal right to object to giving, say, a Nazi tattoo.
• A Native American baker had best not be making a fuss about making a cake with a Washington Redskins theme.
• A black photographer has no legal business objecting to doing glamour shots for Confederate re-enactors.

Remember; no hate!

(OK, I cribbed the idea from Amy Alkon)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

House extended ban on all-plastic guns for another 10 years.  Meaningless gesture.  Nobody gets shot with them, banning them won’t stop people from making them any more than banning cocaine stops people from using it.  Posturing to divert attention from real government failures in every other area.

My grandson has a plastic gun.  He carries it in a holster on his cowboy belt when he rides his hobby horse.  I wonder if Rep. Paymar is intimidated by that, too?

Joe Doakes

Heather Martens will no doubt make them a priority in the next session.

To prevent them from “intimidating” other kids.

You think I’m joking.  But if I’ve learned anything living in a city full of liberals with no fear of being held accountable, today’s sardonic jokes are tomorrow’s laws.

Or yesterday’s laws, in some cases.

There are two ways to look at Rep. Keith Ellison’s statement to a group of minimum wage protesters last week; emphasis added by me:

“We in Congress will try to raise the minimum wage. We got opponents on the other side of the aisle who say that there shouldn’t be no minimum wage. So, we are in difficulty fighting these guys.

“But, we know, at the executive level, an executive order can change the situation. We demand it, right now. Mr. President, sign the executive order. We demand this federal worker work reform, federal contractors. Give the pay raise, the livable, fair wage. Let’s do it now. I gave him a letter to this effect, yesterday.”

As Ellison walked off stage, the crowd chanted: “Sign the executive order!”

Either Ellison thinks Obama is a King, with absolute control over this country, or he has very little respect for his audience and thinks he can trick them into believing so. 

I’m going to lean toward “has very little respect, and thinks he can trick them”; that a graduate of a Jesuit high school, Wayne State University and a Tier 1 law school thinks saying things like “shouldn’t be no minimum wage” is authentic reeks of distilled cynicism.

Here’s Senator John Pedersen’s website running for the CD6 nomination.

Here’s my piece on Mandela.

And here’s Berg’s Law.

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.  We’ll be talking about Nelson Mandela, the Vikings stadium, the Vikings, and heaven only knows what else.
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is  back!  Brad’ll have Marty Seifert on the show.  “The Closer” airs from 1-3 Sundays!

(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!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This law purports to require society to be structured around the lowest common denominator but discriminates against people in comas, and those in an iron lung, and quadriplegics. Why are Canucks such haters?

Do they also require keys to be huge, like the key to a medieval church door, so frail hands get more leverage to turn them?

Is there no limit to societal engineering downward?

Joe Doakes

I’d suggest “dealing with crappy software” as one counterexample.

There’s little I can say about the passing of Nelson Mandela that many others haven’t already said better.

I watched a little of CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage yesterday – and was struck not so much by the elegiac coverage of Mandela and his life (deservedly so) as by the ninety seconds’ revisionist hate hate that the likes of Christiane Amanpour were directing back at Ronald Reagan.

Of course, history records the fact that Reagan opposed legislation that would have confronted the Pretoria government over apartheid. It was the only veto of his that the Democrats ever overrode.

The left has tried to portray this as racism, then and now.

That, of course, relies on hindsight.

The ANC was far from above terrorist activity, before and during Mandela’s imprisonment; his wife Winnie was fingered in numerous murders, kidnappings, assaults and other human rights violations, and she vocally endorsed the practice of “necklacing” political opponents (jamming a car tire around them and lighting them on fire – a particularly hideous form of premeditated murder).

If a group using rhetoric like the ANC’s were operating in the US today, being on Janet Napolitano’s watch list would be the least of their legal worries.

And the track record of Mandela’s contemporaries was pretty ghastly. Robert Mugabe’s revolt against white rule was successful – at the price of pretty much destroying Zimbabwe, which remains a less onerous place then North Korea today only because of the incompetence of the state’s agents. Other similar nationalists in places like Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Angola and the Congo/Zaire created vastly more trouble than they solved.

So Mandela’s greatest accomplishment was not that he toppled white rule – that was going to happen eventually one way or another, by war, ballot or negotiation. It was that he managed to do it without plunging South Africa into the nightmarish miasma of misery that’s attended the rule of virtually all of his contemporaries; that he and the transitional government he led accomplished the job of changing South Africa without descending into (much of) the orgy of retributive violence that greeted the assumption of black rule in Zimbabwe, or the wholesale destruction of economies, societies and uncounted masses of lives in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and a raft of other sub-Saharan nations.

Reagan, it is fair to say, got Mandela wrong. It is not, however, fair to say there wasn’t ample precedent for believing South Africa could have turned out much worse than it did.

And the post-apartheid story is not only still being written – it’s not that great for South Africa. The ANC’s post-Mandela leadership has proved corrupt and incompetent. As most of sub-Saharan Africa slowly claws it’s way to sustainability, South Africa is in economic decline. Hindsight in view of South Africa’s current reality makes Mandela look as much a hero of principled competence as the statuesque moral lesson that’s leading all the newscasts today.

Which is a great elegy for a historic hero; that his reality match his legend.

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