SCENE:  A Ramada Inn in Inver Grove Heights.  Outside the hotel, the letter-board sign says “Independence Party now accepting Applications to run for US Senate”.  The sign is subtitled “No Experience Necessary”.

Cut to inside a small meeting room inside the hotel.  Posters of Jesse Ventura and Dean Barkley prominently adorn the wall behind three people sitting at a long table.   

Mince MIETZ, a short scholarly-looking man in his thirties clad in an ill-fitting tweed jacket bearing a button identifying him as the “Independence” Party deputy director for protocol, is holding candidate screenings in a small conference room.  Along with MIETZ sits Verdana FONT, a serious-looking short-haired fifty-something woman in short hair and a peasant skirt.  She is the Indy Party’s secretary.  Lionel BULK, a sixtyish, professorial looking fellow with a meerchaum pipe and a bow tie, sits to their left.

MIETZ:  I call this meeting of the Independence Party US Senate Nominations Committee to order!

FONT: Excellent!

BULK:  Remember.  We’re going to stick to the Independence Party’s core principles!

FONT:  Right.  Speaking of which, Mince, would you read those to me so I can…

MIETZ:  (Yells out the door) Next!

(In the door walks Thorn THOMAS, a tidy, trim man of about sixty with horn-rimmed glasses in a houndstooth suit).

FONT: Have a seat, Mr. Thomas!

THOMAS:  (Softly). Thank you.

BULK:  So, Mr. Thomas – what’s your background, that would qualify you to run for the United States Senate?

THOMAS:  I was undersecretary of Commerce for Differential Tax Application Theory under the Carlson Administration.  In that capacity, I was in charge of calculating tax differentials based on abstruse accounting theories intended to find relationships between dissimilar cultural phenomenae and tax receipts.  Then, I formed a Public Relations agency, where I’ve mostly represented Minnesota social service non-profits.  I ran for Hennepin County Soil and Water Commission in 2004 as a non-partisan candidate endorsed by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, the SEIU, ISAIAH and the Teamsters.  And I am a permanent, tenured adjunct at the Humphrey Center.

MIETZ:  Excellent.  So – what would be your platform if you were to get the Independence Party nomination to run against the GOP nominee?

BULK: Umm…

MIETZ: …and Al Franken.

THOMAS:  I believe in not just good government, but the best government.  I believe if we give government the people, money and respect it needs, everyone benefits.

(MIETZ, BULK and FONT confer briefly).

MIETZ:  Excellent, Mr. Thomas.  Thank you!  Please leave a resume and a head shot.

(THOMAS leaves a manila folder and leaves the room)

FONT:  Well, he certainly seems to be an homage to the Independence Party’s roots, a la Tim Penny and Dean Barkley!

MIETZ:  Yep.  I believe we could get behind him!  (Yells out door) Next!

(In the door walks Garth MULLER, former Vice Chair for Ideological Purity at the Minnesota 5th CD Libertarian Party.  We walks in at the head of a bearded, bow-tied entourage of twenty-and-thirty-ish white males, many of whom are chuckling and giggling softly as they line up along the wall as MULLER takes his seat).

MIETZ:  And you are…?

MULLER:  I’m Garth Muller.  I’m an anarcho-libertarian.  I was a conservative Republican, but then I decided to support Ron Paul.  I now believe all parties are exactly identical, although I think the Independence Party is different (members of bearded, bow-tied retinue chuckle impulsively).

BULK:  Excellent.  So – your platform?

MULLER:  Abolish all government.  Make all human interactions voluntary.

FONT:  So…legalize everything.

MULLER:  No.  To “legalize” something implies we recognize the legitimacy of law in the first place.  Abolish law and all means to enforce it.  It’s all just a form of force inflicted on the people. 

FONT:  So you used to be a Republican…

MULLER:  Most of us used to be (a few scattered hisses break out among the entourage) but after what happened at the convention in 2012, I’ll never vote Republican again. 

MIETZ:  Thank you very much, Mr. Muller!  Please leave a resume and a head shot.  (MULLER’s entourage breaks out laughing at term “head shot” as they leave the room).

BULK:  In the 30 years I spent in the DFL, I never heard of such a thing.

MIETZ:  (sotto voce with a conspiratorial grin) Oh, I bet you have not, Lionel.  (To BULK):  Oh, I have.  Like a lot of disaffected Republicans.

FONT:  A lot?

MIETZ:  Enough!  No, he matches the Independence Party’s principles perfectly fine, too! OK – who’s next?

FONT:  Wait – Muller and Thomas were absolute opposites!  One was a Carlson Republican, and the other was so far out on the Libertarian wing that Ron Paul would probably tell him to take it easy…

MIETZ:  Yeah!   I know!

(Avery LIBRELLE walks into the room, leaves a resume and a head shot).

MIETZ:  And you are Avery Librelle?  Have a seat!

LIBRELLE:  I prefer to stand!

For the injustices we face are too great, the enemies that support them too entrenched, and the damange they are causing too horrible, for a thinking person to sit!  It is time to RISE!

(FONT dabs a tear from her eye.  So does BULK).

MIETZ:  So what prompts you to run on the Independence Party ticket?

LIBRELLE:  The needs – a strong social safety net, teachers that want for nothing, single payer healthcare, and equality for all – are needs that my mentor Paul Wellstone instilled in me from an impressionable age!

But then the DFL betrayed us, and I believe its time for a different party to…

MIETZ:  Oh, look at the time.  We’ll be in touch!

(LIBRELLE leaves the room).

FONT:  (wiping tears from her eyes).  What?  Librelle was perfect!

BULK:  Yes – that was a perfect encapsulation of what the Independence Party stood for back when it was founded!

MIETZ:  Well, yes.  But then the first two were even better!

FONT:  How so?

MIETZ:  You’re new at this, aren’t you?

BULK:  Well, I’m new to the Independence Party.

MIETZ:  Everyone is new to the Independence Party!   It’s like this…

(Gretel STROMBERG walks into the room.  The Executive Director of “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes”, she is dressed in a low-cut black cocktail dress and a pair of strappy black high-heeled “talk politics to me” pumps)

(Without a word, STROMBERG slinks around behind BULK, who sits, speechlessly, as STROMBERG drags her black boa around his neck, breathing seductively in his ear.  She then leaves a box of chocolates in front of FONT, nibbles on MIETZ’ earlobe, and leaves a paper bag full of $20 bills labelled “Best Regards, “Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes; Don’t Show This Bag To The Campaign Finance Board!  XOXOXO, MUFAPC!” on the chair where the candidates had been)

(Then STROMBERG leaves, as quietly as she came, leaving only the scent of her perfume)

MIETZ:  So yeah.  I think MULLER matches our principles this year.

(And SCENE).

Chris Christie – who has stared down mobsters and the New Jersey teachers union, pardon the redundancy, and who issued a denial of knowledge last week of his staff’s alleged shenanigans that is tailor-made to backfire if he does happen to be lying – has come under attack by…

…Gail Collins of the NYTimes.

A woman who recently argued against her colleagues’ sending their good-for-nothing kids who’d been camping in their parents’ basements since graduating from Bard College with degrees in Victimization Studies to North Dakota to earn their keep in the oil fields because of the forty minute lines at McDonalds.

I’m not actually going to ask you to read Gail Collins.

Merely to note that the fact that Gail Collins has written about Chris Christie should be treated as a point for the defense.

Sort of like Nick Coleman.  Only at least Nick Coleman isn’t at the Times.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you speak out against Chris Christie for Governor, you get stuck in traffic for a while.

If you speak out against President Barak Obama, you get audited by the IRS, even if you’re dying of cancer.

Joe Doakes

In politics, people who think their ends justify their means are pretty much at the root of every evil, from planned traffic jams to the Holodomor.

John Gilmore’s piece on R.T. Rybak and his media Praetorian Guard.

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.
• 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 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!

I’ll admit it – handbell choirs were one of those things that swept protestant churches in the 1980s that annoyed the bejeebers out of me.  They were everywhere.

But as with many things related to music (and disaster preparedness) [1] the Mormons have it all over the rest of us goyim.

Case in point; a handbell choir doing “Flight of the Bumblebee”:

[1] And, lately, videography; the last few years of vids from the Mormon Tabernacle’s music department have been visually stunning.

Via XKCD:

Job creation – early-week major-media triumphalism notwithstanding – sputtered last month.

Five people left the work force for every job that was created; that – not “recovery” – is why the unemployment rate “dropped”. 

Why call it a “recovery” at all?

…don’t you dare accuse the media of being the Democrat Party’s Praetorian Guard.

Who did the best job of flensing Jamie Steihm’s bigoted and logically vapid attack in USNWR on SCOTUS justice Sonia Sotomayors’ siding with the law in allowing the Little Sisters of the Poor to define their own perspective on, um, Catholicism, faith and religion? 

Was it Elizabeth “The Anchoress” Scalia?

Was it Ed “The Captain” Morrissey? 

Why choose.  Read them both. 

The only thing I want to add to the whole flap?  Let’s not Catholicize this mess.  There are plenty of us Protestant goyim who object to having the state define the boundaries of our fath too.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You know that moment when the house is totally silent?  The TV is off, the refrigerator stops humming, the kids are asleep and the furnace fan isn’t blowing?  Haven’t had that for the last day or two.  Furnace fan just keeps blowing.  And that’s a good thing.

Thank you, Xcel Energy, for keeping the natural gas and electricity flowing so my house is warm.  Thank you, oil field workers, pipeline maintenance engineers, electricity linemen . . . all the burly men who work in unimaginably bad conditions to provide me with the luxury of sitting in my recliner reading Sci Fi on the Kindle.

Joe Doakes

Last year was the fortieth anniversary of Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey – Bruce Springsteen’s first major-label record.

In those forty years, he’s released seventeen studio albums (#18 due in mere days), been bootlegged more than almost any other artist, written a staggering amount of material, developed a repuation as the best life performer in the business, and been recognized as the best American songwriter of a generation…

…and gone through some creative doldrums (1990-2000) that make even the unabashed fanboys (like yours truly) rub our heads and change the subject to Darkness on the Edge of Town.  

And even for a committed fanboy, it’s hard to explain to a newbie exactly what it’s all about.

Steven Hyden – who notes that he attended the same concert at the Target Center that I did, back in 1999 – takes a “Hot Or Not”-style whack at the oeuvre, giving an “Overrated”, “Underrated” or “Properly Rated” to an assortment of mileposts in Springsteen’s career; the studio albums, live albums, outtakes collections, live performances, members of the E-Street Band, videos, and various bits of pop-culture ephemera. 

And I’m only going to quibble with Hyden on three of his ratings;

First:  Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez was a lousy drummer.  Listen to “Kitty’s Back” or “Incident on 57th Street” or even “Rosalita”, from The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle; the beat speeds up and slows down without warning, and that’s what they decided to put on a major-label release.  How much worse were the out-takes? 

Second?  While “Fire” is a good song, and “Light of Day” is a great one, “Because The Night” is still the best Springsteen song not originally released by Springsteen:  It’s just a fact.

And while Hyden and I agree – Darkness on the Edge of Town is both of our favorite Bruce album – Hyden focuses on its rock-critic-friendly cynicism and world-weariness.  For me, it’s nearly the opposite; the record resonates for anyone who identifies with deep isolation, with a place outside the American mainstream, whether you’re across the river from Manhattan or across 100 miles of sod from a city that gets more than two TV channels. 

(And while he’s right – Live from Hammersmith Odeon is far and away the best “official” live release of Bruce’s career, the very unofficial “Live at the Capitol Theater”, recently posted in its entirety on Youtube, may count as another essential, if lower-gloss, live recording worth listening to)

On the other hand, Hyden distilled perhaps the iconic image of the young, male, non-Jersey Springsteen fan in his review ofBorn to Run:

There’s a particular brand of vanity that exists in certain kinds of young men between the ages of 19 and 27 where it’s vitally important to present a façade that is equal parts masculine, feminine, tough, and sensitive. For instance (and this example is purely hypothetical and not at all autobiographical), this certain kind of young man may drive around alone late on rainy nights — he actually chooses to drive when it rains because it is appropriately evocative for his inner emotional geography — while listening to Clarence Clemons’s sax solo on “Jungleland.” And when he feels himself starting to cry, he will look in the rearview mirror in order to stare at his own tears. He knows he will never tell anyone that he cries alone to the sounds of the Big Man’s titanic blowing, but he guesses that strangers will sense it, and this will make him appear soulful. (Forgive him. He is a little naive and very silly.) It doesn’t matter that the lyrics of “Jungleland” have virtually nothing to do with his life — he’s pretty sure that the only people for whom “kids flash guitars just like switchblades” represents reality are Danny Zuko and Kenickie. But this song is still his avatar, and he’s confident it always will be.

And on some of those dark, rainy nights, he still just may.

(Except for the crying.  Because – dude).

Anyway – you be the judge.

What do I always say? 

If a liberal talking head – whether it’s Grace Kelly or Martin Bashir – says something about any conservative or conservative group?  Distrust but verify.  And then, having verified and found the claim vaporous, pretty much invariably continue distrusting. 

“What?  Even with a Rhodes Scholar like Rachel Maddow?”

Especially with a Rhodes Scholar like Rachel Maddow. 

Youth Misery Index – a combination of unemployment rate, college loan debt and each youth’s share of the national debt – breaks all prior records under Obama:

The index, released Wednesday, was calculated by adding youth unemployment and average college loan debt figures with each person’s share of the national debt. While it has steadily grown over the decades, under Obama the figure has shot up dramatically, from 83.5 in 2009 to 98.6 in 2013.

The index has increased by 18.1 percent since Obama took office, the highest increase under any president, making Obama the worst president for youth economic opportunity, according to the nonprofit that released the figure.

“Young people are suffering under this economy,” said Ashley Pratte, program officer for Young America’s Foundation, which developed the index and calculates it annually using federal statistics. “They’re still living in their parent’s basements, unable to find full-time jobs that pay them what they need in order to pay back their debt.”

Like most people who have a younger generation to talk to, I will tell the young ‘uns that things were much tougher when I was a kid than today.  The snow was deeper, the weather colder, the wind sharper, the teachers meaner. 

And in many cases I’m right.

But as a guy who grew up under the Carter years, and turned 18 right after Reagan’s election, even I don’t envy the lot of today’s 16-to-25-year-olds.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason it’s so cold is because of global warming.  See, the Earth being so much warmer, that warm air has spread to the North Pole, where it dislodged a spinning top full of cold air that’s spilling over the nation, making the US colder.  It’s colder because it’s warmer.

True, none of the climate change models predicted this effect; but that only means we have a lot to learn about how badly humans have screwed up the planet by driving SUVs and eating beef.

Okay, I concede I know nothing about climate science so it’s at least possible the new and improved theory is true.  But adding Polar Vortex now smells a lot like adding Retrograde Motion to explain why the other planets really do revolve around the Earth.  I remain skeptical.

Joe Doakes

Turns out the thing I never learned about the scientific method during my semester as a biology major – “all evidence for AND against a theory supports the theory” – was the thing I needed most.

This year, as the National Review’s editors remind us, is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of war on…poverty. 

Of course, poverty – which had been dropping steadily since the end of World War 2, as the US enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic supremacy after the war – rose after Johnson “declared war” as part of his “Great Society”, which was little more than an extension and expansion of the New Deal.  It dipped under Reagan, rose and then fell under Clinton, and has reached a new peak under Obama.

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic book A Parliament of Whores, once half-joked that if we took the money our bureaucracy spends on poverty in all its forms – food assistance, housing assistance, medical aid, cash, WIC, all of it – and simply gave it to the poor, we could raise ever single American’s income to above the poverty line, and save money in the process. 

The problem, of course, is that the War On Poverty was never really designed to fight poverty.  Oh, there was an altrusitic motivation, to be sure – many Poverty Warriors do honestly believe their mission is to lead the poor out of perdition.

But as with all of the left’s big initiatives, it’s really about consolidating and extending power. And so while the war on poverty has been a miserable failure at ending the misery of being poor, it’s been a magnificent success at extending the reach of the “progressive” stranglehold:

No doubt programs such as Head Start were launched with a great deal of idealism, but as their ineffectiveness became apparent, it was not idealism that sustained them but political self-interest. Providing at best temporary relief to the poor, the permanent welfare bureaucracies benefit Democrats by creating thousands of well-paid positions for their political allies and subsequent campaign contributions for their candidates. Head Start today is a money-laundering program through which federal expenditures are transmitted to Democratic candidates through the Service Employees International Union, which represents many Head Start teachers. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents, among others, the welfare bureaucrats at the Administration for Children and Families, is a large political donor that gives about 94 percent of its largesse to Democrats. This is not coincidental. The main beneficiaries of the war on poverty have not been and will not be the poor; the beneficiaries are the alleged poverty warriors themselves. The war on poverty is war on the Roman model in which soldiers are paid through plunder.

Perversely, the “War on Poverty” has institutionalized the things – single-parent households, terrible education – that truly entrench poverty. 

And as we head toward a legislative session (in many states including Minnesota) where the Democrats will move to drag business into the role of paying for the War via massive hikes to the minimum wage, it’s worth remembering this:

Democrats are scandalized that Republicans resist the expansion of welfare benefits, and Republicans are, or at least should be, scandalized that so many Americans need them. What looks like compassion in the short term is in the long term a refusal to deal with the problem: in some cases an inability to find sustaining work, in others a refusal to do so.

It’s tempting, and tantalizing, to wonder – what would have happened had America not squandered so much of its hard-earned treasure on a “war on poverty” that ended up only entrenching and expanding poverty, and reinforcing the party of poverty, the Democrats? 

How much more prosperous would be be today?  How much less misery would there be?

Read the NRO editorial.

“Progressive” and Administration efforts to shut up conservatives are continuing apace as the nation gets set for another ugly round of elections.

One of their latest memes?  “Dark Money”.

To hear the usual liberal suspects (including most of the “news” media – “Dark Money” is an insidious scourge against Democracy.

But of course, the definition depends entirely on who’s using it.  And I don’t entirely mean “if it’s Alita Messinger, it’s OK”.

No, the hypocrisy goes deeper than that:

The HuffPo and the rest of the left define “dark money” groups as non-profits who don’t have to disclose the identity of donors. This non-disclosure of donors is actually a byproduct of the civil rights struggle, when the government sought to protect donors from intimidation by groups like the KKK. Given that conservatives feel the need for anonymity over their political speech is a stark reflection of how far leftist rhetoric has devolved.

And why do conservative donors feel the need to protect their identities?

Ahead of his reelection in 2012, President Obama published an “enemies list” of donors to his opponent Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign even urged supporters to “report” attacks on the President’s record. Business Frank VanderSloot found himself the subject of two IRS audits, an investigation by the Department of Labor and the subject of an investigation by a Democrat Senate staffer, just days and weeks after being publicly named as a major Romney donor.

At the end of 2013, a cancer patient, Bill Elliot, went public with the news that his health insurance had been cancelled due to ObamaCare. An insurance broker, C. Steven Tucker, heard about his situation and helped Elliot get new insurance coverage. Both men appeared in the press about the events. Both men also, on the exact same day, were notified by the IRS that they were being audited.

Given the details revealed last year about how the IRS targeted conservative and grass roots organizations for extraordinary scrutiny and review, it is not unreasonable for conservatives to worry that they will be targeted for their political activity.

And like the campaign against ALEC, it’s all further evidence in favor of Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals attack conservatives motives, commitment to freedom or ethics, it’s a cover for something they’re doing themselves.

But this year, there’s the added imperative change the conversation.

To anything!

The left knows they are at a disadvantage. HuffPo’s warning about “dark money” is just the first salvo in the campaign to silence the right this year. To paraphrase the old legal saw, if neither the facts or the law are on your side, pound the table. The left is going to pound the table loudly until November.

Look for the scourge of ALEC to make its reappearance as the Minnesota legislative sessions re-opens next month.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Four teens are charged with crimes for unsuccessfully attempting to rob a gun store:

. . . including robbery, possessing an instrument of crime, reckless endangerment and possession of a controlled substance . . . .

Once you read the list of charges, the incident becomes self-explanatory.  That’s almost as good as the guy who pulled a gun to demand a McDonald’s job application, then sat around in the booth filling it out until the cops showed up.

Kids these days, I tell ya.

Joe Doakes

Criminals usually aren’t in the top quintile, to put it tactfully.

New York is anything but blasé as de Blasio takes office.

If Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was correct that States are the “laboratories of democracy,” then perhaps America’s cities are the petri dishes – developing political cultures at a micro level.

For 20 years, the Big Apple had largely quarantined the most aggressive tendencies of New York liberalism through a succession of centrist Mayors.  Even for all his nanny-state inclinations, Michael Bloomberg was (as we once noted) all that stood between the average Gothamite and an “army of liberal partisans who saw City Hall as Grand Central Station for a variety of socioeconomic engineering ideas.”

It should be of little surprise then that newly ensconced New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaign certainly looked like something engineered in a political science lab.  De Blasio’s “tale of two cities” rhetoric, his promises to end “income inequity” and repeal “stop and frisk” defined his candidacy as being in stark contrast to Bloombergian Era.  Despite Bloomberg polling at a 51% approval as he left office and his supposedly controversial police chief Ray Kelly at 64%, de Blasio won running directly against the accomplishments (and their architects) of prior two decades.  Voters who cared about crime and candidate experience – once centerpieces to any New York campaign – barely broke for Republican Joe Lhota, and constituted a paltry 15% of the vote.

De Blasio’s supporters haven’t minced words about the expectations his overwhelming election has created in liberal circles, calling his mayoralty a “progressive revolution.”  Such rhetoric, amplified by a litany of speakers at de Blasio’s inauguration that trashed Michael Bloomberg (with apparently with de Blasio’s consent, as he stated he was “very comfortable with all that was done”), glosses over what exactly entails a “progressive revolution”?

From the early previews, de Blasio’s “revolution” may resemble Michael Bloomberg’s in one key, and often criticized, factor – policy tinkering instead of major reforms.  Candidate de Blaiso talked on the campaign trail about affordable-housing projects, stopping hospital closures, and a tax on upper-income earners to fund, in part, universal pre-kindergarten.  The first act of Mayor de Blasio was to end the handsome cab, horse-draw carriages – a move that drew criticism left and right, and even speculation that the position was based on a campaign pay-off.

Even when de Blasio talks about broader political themes, such his obsession with reducing “income inequality,” it’s rarely followed by policy prescriptions that will address the issue.  Some of de Blasio’s proposals will require support from Albany to enact, including aspects of his desired pre-K and after-school programs, while others reek of desperation to find an agenda, regardless of impact or practicality.  De Blasio declared he would expand the Paid Sick Leave law…which was just passed months ago and hasn’t even been enforced yet.  De Blasio campaigned on a goal of “zero deaths” in New York –  a policy that sounds like it was crafted by King Canute the Great.

If de Blasio truly wanted to address “income inequality,” he could look at New York’s punitive tax structure.  A married couple with $60,000 in taxable income pays nearly $2,000 in taxes to the city alone.  That doesn’t include the 25% federal tax rate for a couple in that income bracket, or the State of New York’s $3,200 in taxes as well.  Without including property taxes, school board levies, and a host of other taxes (how about the city’s 8.875% sales tax?), a couple with $60,000 in earned income would be paying out over $20,000 in taxes in one of the most expensive cities in the world.  Is that “equality”?

I’ve accumulated about 60 sick days since I’ve been writing this blog.  I’m using one today. 

See you tomorrow.

Phil Everly died over the weekend.  He was 74.

Rock and Roll, we are told, started as a blender-mix of rockabilly and R&B.  Elvis put a rockabilly delivery onto a rhythm ‘n blues beat.  Chuck Berry sped up the blues to rockabilly speed.  Johnny Cash did rockabilly over a persona that could have made Howlin’ Wolf go “wow.  That’s the blues”.

And the Everly Brothers brought the final piece of the “billy” half of rockabilly – the tight, keening vocal harmonies that characterized bluegrass music – out of the holler and onto pop radio.

(more…)

…when the DFL trots out a bunch of “reasonable”, “responsible’ ELCA pastors and Highland Park rabbis and suburban police chiefs to demand a “reasonable, responsible” entree to gun-grabbing, give them this in return; Detroit’s police chief.

Supporting armed citizens and the positive effect they have on crime.

Top priorities for Twin Cities Democrat politicians, staff, and media (pardon the redundancy):

Deal with the suddenly-crucial problem of cell phone theft:  “Kill switch” legislation a priority since the Mark Andrew incident.  Because it’s not really an issue until it happens to a DFL politician.  Of course, they’re still going to spend the coming session fighting against the citizen’s write to keep and bear “kill switches” to help prevent thugs from hitting your “kill switch” with a club, knife, or gun.

For heaven’s sake, get Al Franken some cover from that “60th Vote on Medicare” thing:  There’s an election coming up, for Chrissake.  The editors put Kevin Diaz on the “Franken PR Flak” beat this time; his point is, naturally, that there were several “sixtieth votes”, potentially, over time.  Unmentioned; without Franken, all the others were irrelevant.

Cardiac screening is job one!:  OK, not yet.  But I have a hunch with R. T. Rybak’s close call over the weekend, the problem will receive aggressive lip service.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Federal officials claim crude oil from North Dakota has a lower flash point, so it’s more dangerous to transport by rail than crude oil from other sources.

Federal officials continue to block the Keystone Pipeline, which would transport crude oil safely underground.

Federal officials maintain their policy of refusing to issue permits to pump crude oil from leased federal lands.

It’s as if the Obama Administration is determined to stop oil and natural gas production, any way it can, just as we’re facing some of the coldestweather ever.

This is the same mind-set that brought us Obama-care: arrogant despite being ignorant, unswayed by unintended calamity, serenely observing others suffer.

Joe Doakes

You gotta break eggs to make…

…er, whatever the Administration is trying to make.

Here’s the MN Gun Owners PAC website.

Here’s the site for Stewart Mills for Congress.