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!

• Brad Carlson and I will be live at the GOP State Convention in Rochester from 1-3PM today.
• 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)

The convention coverage should coincide with the voting for governor; if the NARN keeps up its usual record, the decision will be made ten minutes after we go off the air – but we’ll do our best!

UPDATE:  Heh.  So much for that prediction.  As this is written (ten minutes before air time) we’re heading for Ballot 10 for Senate, with no sign of things ending.

But we’ll be on the air!  We’ll be talking with Marty Seifert, Dave Thompson, Abdimalik Askar, Torey Westrom, and a whole bunch more!  Tune in!

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
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• 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 be live-blogging (or live-tweeting) the Minnesota GOP Convention tonight.  Or maybe just bar-hopping.  Not really sure.

Tomorrow Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting live from the Convention in Rochester.  Tune in from 1-3 – which, if the race takes three ballots or less, might even be when the winner is determined!

Yeah, I know – she was the “woman who rawks”-du-jour about this time twenty years ago.  She was the Annette Funicello of the Grunge generation – or as a rock critic dubbed her, the “Queen of alt-rock angst”.

And I hate angst.

Well…other peoples’ angst.  Mostly.  Not so much my own.

But I digress.

And her musical heyday was, to be blunt, not my own.  I’d just gotten out of a couple of years of working in bars, and was pretty much tired of music everyone else liked, and had three kids to take care of instead of listening to music.  So when my stepson brought home a copy of Jagged Little Pill, I pretty much disliked it even before I heard it.

But seeing that she’s turning 40 (!) on Sunday, I figured it’d be a good time to unpack this particular love-hate relationship.

She tends toward the shrill – but it’s a really intense kind of shrill, one that wears me out.    There are times it seems like she does the same half-dozen songs forty different ways.

But every once in a while she writes a song I wish I could have written myself:

And in her day – I discovered right after her day – she had one of the best touring bands in the business, which took what could – should – have been a live train wreck suitable only for women’s studies classes and feminist coffee shops and turned it into some damned fine, solid, in-tune-and-on-beat, tight performances:

That’s Taylor Hawkins on drums – currently with the Foo Fighters, and likely the best drummer to come out of the alt-rock genre. The bass player? Chris Chaney, one of the most underrated bass players around (and wasting away in the current incarnation of Jane’s Addiction).  And a couple of guitar players, including a guy with a Fender Jaguar, which was very au courant in Seattle in the nineties, and not a bad instrument if you couldn’t handle a Jazzmaster.

Anyway – I know it’s wrong.  But them’s the facts.

To:  The American Electorate
From: Mitch Berg, Guy Who Was Of Cognitive Age In 1992
Re:  The “Clinton Years”

All,

Michael Barone, writing about the putative Hillary Clinton juggernaut:

It seems that Clinton’s standing reflects less on current judgments of Obama and more on rosy retrospective ratings of the presidency of Bill Clinton. Voters may not be eager for a third Obama term, but might like a third Clinton term.

Now, many of you weren’t adults – or at least not paying attention to politics – between 1992 and 2000 (especially in Minnesota, considering who we elected goverrnor in 1998).  You may have been fed a lot of gauzy beatifics about “the Clinton Years”; they were prosperous and peaceful.

Let’s be clear on why that was.

Twang:  Bill Clinton was a Democrat – but he was no Barack Obama.  He was part of the “Democrat Leadership Conference”, a moderate, business-friendly caucus of Democrat pols and advocates.  The DLC has, by the way, been completely extinguished; there’s no  room in the modern Democrat party for such moderation.

Shriek:  But Hillary was not.  Nobody mistook her for a moderate; she was the fire-breathing liberal of the couple.  And for the first two years of Clinton’s first term, many of her pet initiatives – including “Hillarycare”, which in those innocent days before Obamacare seemed like a grotesque power grab, nationalizing 1/7 of the national economy.  The first two years of Clinton’s reign were not much further to the right than Obama’s.

Pow:  The 1994 elections put a stop to that; the GOP took control of Congress for the first time since the ’30s, in a reaction to the Clintons’ “progressive” overreach.  In response, Clinton swung to the right, triangulating to the GOP’s right on issue after issue – essentially neutering all of Hillary’s “progressive” ambitions – to save his presidency in 1996.

During his last six years in office, Clinton was more fiscally conservative than George W Bush.

Poof:  As a result, between the 1994 landslide and his self-inflicted sex scandals, the best thing about the “Clinton Years” was that government was deadlocked between a Congress that was conservative, and a President that was frantically trying to act conservative.

Jing!:  Of course, deadlocked government works best against a background of overwhelming prosperity.  And the US was prosperous during the mid-late nineties – mostly because by 1994, the economy had shifted from Cold War priorities to full-scale civilian production, the so-called “Peace Dividend”.  All those Cold War-period innovations in technology  started filtering into the civilian market, driving frenetic booms in technology, equities, and consumer spending.  We enjoyed the first genuine peacetime boom since the Roaring Twenties – nation’s economic blender switched to “puree”.

The end of the Cold War was, of course, predicated on the end of the USSR – and that was largely the work of Ronald Reagan.

Bill Clinton didn’t govern anything like Ronald Reagan.  Hillary would be much less so.

The Good Old Days Are Gone For Good:  It’s not the nineties.  The GOP doesn’t control Congress – and any circumstances that lead to a Hillary! win would likely also lead to a blunting of any GOP effort to retake the Senate or extend control of the House – as Barone points out in the piece I link above, people are much more likely to vote straight tickets than they were 22 years ago.

So while the Democrats and media (ptr) will flog the idea that Hillary would be a return of Bill which would lead to a return of their gauzy, soft-focus version of “The Nineties” – it’s just not true.  Hillary is not Bill; without a conservative Congress, it’ll be like having Maxine Waters running things.  And Obama has seen to it there will be no surge of productivity when he leaves office.

We will get an expansion of government power; Obamacare will become un-repealable (even as its most onerous provisions finally kick in – and you really ain’t seen nothing yet).  And government debt will zoom under paleo-“progressive” Hillary!, pushing the nation further and faster down the road to the inevitable financial cataclysm.

That is all.

Mark Andrew is a former Henco commissioner and former DFL chair.  He also works in the “green energy marketing” biz.  Since “government” is the primary target of green industry “marketing”, it’s fair to say Andrew is part of our nation’s ongoing green graft racket – by which the “green” industry tries to chivvy tax money from friendly governments.

And as yesterday’s Strib op-ed shows, he really really doesn’t like the Koch Brothers – their refinery (the Flint Hills refinery in Rosemount), them, or their business:

What make’s their businesses so dirty is not just what they do, but how they do it.

Koch Industries’ corporate ethos is to pollute the American landscape with impunity.

(Really, Mark?  That’s their “ethos”?  The Kochs base their behavior on the idea that polluting is a moral good?  That seems a bit far-fetched).

After hours, they fuel a dark labyrinth of propoganda networks to spew out pollution of another kind-disinformation, defamation and denials. Their goal is not to gain market share–it is to rid the world of government oversight of their businesses and the nefarious groups that prop them up. This is how they roll.

Put another way – and in this case an accurate one?  The Kochs use some of their fortune (in the tens of billions) to press libertarian solutions (some of their stances have angered conservatives and would probably have gotten Andrew’s support, if he were intellectually honest, which this article pretty much confirms he’s not).

Oh, yeah – they’re thought-criminals (emphasis added):

The brothers over the years have outspent ExxonMobil’s subsidies of shadow climate denier groups by a 3-1 margin.

But this piece isn’t just an attack on the Kochs.

No – it’s against those polluted by association – in this case, the Ordway Theatre in Saint Paul, which the Koch Brothers help underwrite (again, emphasis added):

It is not so curious then, that the Koch’s would want to align themselves with St.Paul’s Ordway Theatre, one of the nation’s leading non-profit live performance venues. The 14th Annual “Flint Hills International Children’s Festival, presented by the Ordway” opens this weekend, and is the perfect halo under which the conglomerate might dwell for a few days, basking in the glow of delighted children whose lives are put at risk by their business and political actions.

The Koch’s [sic] and the Ordway’s that birthed the theatre couldn’t be a starker study in contrasts…Bathed in a riot of color, the brochure captures multi-colored children carefully photographed and captivated by a phantasmagoria of dance, music, acrobatics and reverie. And not a refinery to be found!

The stagings are fantasy adventures as far removed from daily reality as the Koch brothers’ climate change denials.

One wonders if the Kochs slither about in black capes and top-hats and laugh maniacally as they twirl their waxed mustaches.

What Andrew is trying to do is “shame” the Ordway – and the rest of Minnesota’s cultural community – into putting the Kochs “beyond the pale”.   Something like this:

Look for more of this; well-heeled liberals badgering Big Minnesota into dissociating with anyone who pushes back against Big Narrative.

Because to the Minnesota left, the only act that can be shamed any more is disagreeing with Big Left.

Epilogue:  A local journo pointed out on Facebook that Andrew’s op-ed reads a lot like Andrew’s former boss at the Minnesota Daily – Nick Coleman.

I toyed with responding on Facebook “A badly-written hatchet job, long on name-calling, thoughtcrime-shaming and innuendo and short on fact?  Yes, I see the similarity”.

But I don’t like it when people gunk up my Facebook page, either.   But it never ceases to amaze me – journalists actually think Nick Coleman is a good writer and reporter.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Swiss voted down a minimum wage of $25 per hour.   Based on what I heard from the DFL when Minnesota was debating this issue, the Swiss economy will now collapse, children will starve and a rain of frogs will begin any minute now.

 Any minute now.

 Any minute.

 Joe Doakes

Or a revolution. A revolution of McDonalds workers.

Any ol’ time.

Carrie Lucking may be the second most powerful person in Minnesota.

She’s the “Executive Director” of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – meaning that when Alida Messinger says “jump”, Lucking tells “Governor” Dayton how high, and off what, he’s to leap. 

She is, in effect, the real “Lieutenant Governor” of Minnesota.

But beyond that, she is in charge of ABM’s endless campaign to disinform (or as they used to say, “lie to”) the people of Minnesota – or, more accurately, to the low-information voters that are the DFL’s most important constituency. 

And she unleashed a howler yesterday:

State Senator Dave Thompson portrays himself as an unabashed conservative: a vocal, passionate defender of liberty at all costs.

Given this image, it’s notable that the former conservative talk radio host hasn’t published a blog or posted his legislative newsletter online since 2013. Whatever happened in 2013 that would make Thompson go mum in 2014? Hmmmm….

Could it be politics?

Well, duh.  Of course it’s politics. Specifically, the politics of making yourself “opposition-researcher proof”.  If you’re considering running for office, you take down your blog; you stop Tweeting; you hide your Facebook page.  All of your messaging goes through your campaign; it’s all vetted, measured and slept on before it’s put out in front of the public and the media, to avoid “ready-fire-aim” moments like Judi Dutcher’s “Ethanol” flub, or any of Michele Bachmann’s history of PR botches – because the media is always looking for a good political flub, and ABM will be there to make sure the media don’t miss any such flubs. 

Or even non-flubs. 

So when Lucking breathlessly purrs…:

Thompson announced his campaign for Governor in the summer of 2013, a few months after he stopped publishing his From the Senate Floor blog and Senate newsletter

Thompson has gone mum

online.

Posting snafu? New legislative aide who forgot to put the newsletter online?

…she’s being disingenuous.  She knows as well as anyone that every candidate, GOP or DFL – at least every smart one – locks down their commentary when they’re getting ready to go on the trail. 

One thing is certain, though. Dave Thompson the radio host sure had a lot more to say than Dave Thompson the politician running for Governor.

Well, duh. 

Now, Carrie Lucking is a terrible writer and a breathless apparatchik – but she knows her audience; people who don’t know any better.  People who don’t have the time, inclination, or resources to check the story behind the “stories” ABM shovels to them.  People who only follow politics for the day, or days, or week or two before elections, people who make up their minds about elections over gut reactions and visceral responses to chanting points and sound bites, as well as the self-lobotomized droogs that wouldn’t know how not to vote DFL. 

Behind everyone who doesn’t really know the facts and doesn’t want to or know how to find them out for themselves, is a potential DFL voter. 

But that’s what Lucking gets paid to write.

The real question; will Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib, or Tom Scheck at MPR, ever point out to the less-informed in the audience what a facile bit of rhetoric this is?  Will MPR’s “Poligraph” give this statement the “Oh, Hell No” it deserves?   Will anyone in the Minnesota mainstream media ever tackle the Alliance’s endless, cynical campaign of disinformation, not to mention probe their deeply incestuous relationship with the Governor’s office and the DFL?

Place your bets.

Real economic growth…didn’t exist in the first quarter:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property

located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent in the first quarter according to

the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP

increased 2.6 percent.

The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for

the “advance” estimate issued last month. In the advance estimate, real GDP was estimated to have

increased 0.1 percent. With this second estimate for the first quarter, the decline in private inventory

investment was larger than previously estimated.

Some lefty pundits are blaming the “tough winter”.

I remember some tough winters in ’83-85.  The economy kept on recovering, somehow.  Perhaps shovel and snowblower factories and shoveling crews were hiring?

The real answer?  It goes beyond President Obama.  “Progressivism” destroys economies and lives.

Minnesota’s property forfeiture laws – which allowed law enforcement to confiscate property they believed was involved in crimes even before anyone was convicted – started out under the Carlson Administration – during America’s last major round of drug hysteria, in the early-mid ’90s, when the national murder rate spiked over the crack trade and Minnesota was reeling from the early-decade carnage in Minneapolis where, driven by gangs, the murder rate briefly spiked to some fairly astronomical levels.

If the police grab your property – car, house, whatever – you have to file suit to get it back, proving that your property didn’t in fact commit a crime or some such other legalistic buncombe.

And for all of Jesse Ventura’s libertarian palaver, his administration never addressed the issue.  And if anyone pulled Jesse Ventura’s strings, it was Dean Barkley, moderate-DFLer turned “Independence Party” guru and Jesse Ventura’s main advisor and for two  months, US Senator after Paul Wellstone died (and Ventura passive-aggressively refused to appoint election winner Norm Coleman to fill the period between the election and the swearing-in).

So maybe events have conspired to create another small-l libertarian?

Barkley’s ordeal started in April, he told me. He had lent the vehicle for a day to a relative to haul some tires. That relative was driving the GMC SUV when he got pulled over on Interstate 394, and Golden Valley police charged him with DWI and drug possession. They also seized the vehicle.

When Barkley went down to police headquarters, he was informed that they intended to keep the vehicle permanently under forfeiture laws. Barkley, who’s an attorney, was appalled.

Barkley has one distinct advantage: lawyer friends who will take his case on pro bono. Normally, it would cost about $5,000 to hire a lawyer to fight a forfeiture, making it pointless to do so if your property is worth less than that.

One of his attorneys, Philip Villaume, said the Golden Valley police have not violated any policies by refusing to give up the car so far, but he said he expects that as an innocent owner, Barkley will win it back in court – eventually. How long will that take? About three months, he said.

What’s the old saying?  “A Republican is a Democrat that’s been mugged; a Libertarian is a Republican who’s been audited”?

Barkley said he did not think much about forfeiture law in his political days, but he’s thinking about it now. “It goes against every constitutional concept that I studied in law school. If somebody is guilty of something, fine. This way they presume you’re guilty… I think it’s screwy. I think it’s completely backwards.”

Yes, it certainly is.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Help thousands of customers into loans they can’t afford leading to foreclosure, bankruptcy, and Trillions in federal bailouts . . . yawn.

Help a few people hide money from the tax collectors . . . $2.5 Billion in fines.

Priorities

You can’t take a house out of the country. Taxpayers are another matter.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Dental care in Australia is free.  So everybody wants it.  So you have to wait your turn.  Might take a bit.

 “Springborg said before the NPA, patients were waiting up to 10 years for dental work.”

 And what is this NPA?  The government tossed 200 Million Australian Dollars into the fund to allow patients to go outside the system to private dentists, a one-time shot to reduce the wait which now is under a year.  The government can’t afford to repeat the subsidy, so wait times will rise again.  It’s only a toothache, right?  What’s a few months wait when it’s FREEEEEE!

 Joe Doakes

The defining trait of liberals is that they all seem to assume that if you wish hard enough for a miracle – free dental care, universal healthcare without raising taxes or the deficit or degrading healthcare, raising minimum wages without unintended consequences to employment and prices – that a unicorn will descend from the skies with the means to make it happen.

Although maybe I can claim royalties…

…provided I can claim royalties for a collective piece of fiction.

Or “fiction”, if you read the site. 

(more…)

SCENE:  As America decides its political course for the next few years, an omniscient narrator asks an illustrative, rhetorical question.

THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR:   So, American electorate:  if you have a choice between being beaten to death, or living a normal life, which do you pick?

THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE:  Those are the choices?

THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR:  Yep.  Beaten to death, or normal life.

THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE:  And when you say “beaten to death”, you mean…

THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR:  …pummeled with baseball bats until you bleed to death from multiple blunt force injuries.

THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE:  Huh.  Life, or getting beaten to death. Let me think.

THE OMNISCIENT NARRATOR:  Take your time.

THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE: Can we settle on just getting pummeled until we get badly injured?

(And SCENE)

Last week in the Strib, an op-ed by Will Stancil – described as “Will Stancil is a researcher at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota” – declared:

But in the Twin Cities, many of those grade-schoolers are sitting in segregated classrooms. Single-race schools have been making a comeback in Minnesota.

It’s the charter schools that are the problem. Charters are rapidly growing, but still controversial, with their effectiveness hotly debated. Despite that controversy, or perhaps because of it, a disturbing reality about charters is widely overlooked: Many boast student bodies that are entirely composed of members of one race.

Stancil concluded:

We can’t allow new ideas about education to erode civil rights progress…Charter advocates frequently insist on the need to close the equity gap and create opportunity for all students, no matter their race. But their commendable agenda cannot proceed in a segregated organization. As we celebrate Brown’s legacy, we should also remember its lessons: that integration is the grandfather of all equity issues and that racial separation is a root cause of American inequality…Charter schools should not allow themselves to become flagbearers for a divided system reminiscent of an uglier era.

I read it – and marked it down to address this week. 

But Bill Wilson – the first black Saint Paul City Councilman – and education activist Joe Nathan did it first, in the Strib, and did a fine job…

…in part by noting Stancil’s invocation of the “S” word was cheap, inflammatory and wrong (emphasis added):

Some critics don’t seem to understand the huge difference between forcing people, because of their race, to attend a school, and giving new options to people, especially those from low-income families and families of color.

This exposes the great divide in education – between:

1. the “public” mandate that uses the school system to send society a symbolic message (however good that message may be), and maybe “educate” the kids in the bargain
2. The “individual choice” model, which empowers families to, y’know, see to their kids’ education.

For many kids, school is hard enough without having to solve all the social problems their parents kicked down the road to them.  And so their families choose – choose! – schools that actually work, on the assumption that it’s better for their kids to compete on a more level intellectual playing field later than to serve as some bureaucrat’s statistical incentive today. 

Read the Wilson/Nathan piece.  Compare it with Stancil’s tone-deaf vapidity.

And then remember which party has always fought against school choice.

…how the media would treat a Republican lawmaker who’d accomplished less in 14 years than Betty McCollum?

“Empty Suit”?  “Waste of a Chair?”  I mean, just think of all the things they said about Rod Grams, who accomplished more in eight years than Saint Paul Wellstone did in 12.

But it’s Betty McCollum whose toenails the Strib’s Allison Sherry has been given the job to paint.  And so McCollum’s decades of indolence are described thus:

McCollum, an understated lawmaker who got her political start on the North St. Paul City Council,

She’s “understated”.

Hm.

After 14 years in office, her signature accomplishment?  Attacking National Guards advertisements at NASCAR events that cost less per year than building a block and a half of the Central Corridor train line and money pit that she tirelessly championed.  Less than an eighth of the money she helped dragoon the government into spending on the Union Depot.  Less than the proverbial fart in the wind compared with the Obamacare debacle she saddled us with (but can’t defend to save her life, without lying)?

Understated.

If a Democrat pushed someone off the High Bridge to their death, the media would describe the victim as “damp”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Excellent job of capturing what the DFL thinks about Ambassador Stevens’ dead body being dragged through the streets of Benghazi as a result of the failure of Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama’s Middle East policy.

Courtesy Star Tribune

Joe Doakes

Two points:

• Editorial cartoonists trend left – but I’m at a loss to think of a major-market editorial cartoonist who is a more baldfaced Democrat lapdog than Steve Sack.
• This city is full of crappy cartoonists.
• I think this qualifies as a Berg’s Seventh Law citation.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is an interesting set of questions.  Too bad there’s not a chance in Hell they’ll ever get straight answers.

Joe Doakes

We’re close enough to 2016 where I’m sure Obama figures he can run out the clock.

It seems like just yesterday Katie Kieffer and her friends were vexing the management at Saint Thomas with all sorts of conservative hijinx – like publishing a conservative newspaper on the famously liberal campus, and booking an appearance by Ann Coulter over the fervid phumphering of college president Dennis “Havana Denny” Dease.

Katie’s on to bigger and better things, now; her first book, Let Me Be Clear, is coming out next month.   We talked about it on the show last Saturday; it’s Katie’s view of the world facing Millennials, and what to do about it.

She’s holding a pre-launch party; it’s on Wednesday, June 4th from 6-8:30 pm. at Casper’s Cherokee in Eagan (just off Cliff at Nichols).  And unlike some big-buck K Street soirée, yoiu’re invited…

…or, actually, technically, you have the ability to invite yourself!

Sue Jeffers, Ed Morrissey and I will be there.  Hope you can be too!

A deeply mentally ill child of immense privilege…

…from a family that is very, very likely left of center (given where the father lives and the industry he works in), not that that necessarily should matter…

…who stabbed three victims, shot three (of whom four were men and two were women) and critically injured two more with his car…

…in a gun-free zone…

…in a state that has some of the “toughest” gun controls in the country, and spent the last year ratcheting up restrictions on law-abiding gun buyers…

…is the fault of the NRA and the gun-rights movement?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Since the right to an abortion and the right to bear arms are both fundamental Constitutional rights, this ruling should pave the way to institute some long overdue sensible restrictions on abortions: background checks with photographs and fingerprints, registration with the government, limit to one abortion per year, classroom training before the procedure . . . these are all required to possess a firearm so they should be required to obtain an abortion.

 

Next, I’d like to see the Star Tribune’s registration and the background checks on their reporters.

 

The worst part is the “reasoning” the judge uses.  Citing a few mass shootings, but carefully avoiding the other 99% of the murders he uses as justification, those being the killings committed with guns that were not registered and will never be registered, carried and used by felons who can never legally own or carry. Nothing in these regulations will address the real problem; therefore, the regulations are not substantially related to a legitimate government purpose and should have been stricken down.

 

Joe Doakes

The epidemic of judges ignoring the Constitution is one we as a society are going to need to deal with if the Constitution is ever to really matter.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You don’t need to see our appointment logs to check VA wait times; we’ve carefully checked our records and confirmed we were right all along.   So that’s settled.

 

This is the level of investigative journalism that meets the standards of the MSM.  The VA said they don’t have secret lists, so they don’t.  Because if the VA had secret stuff they would say so.  You know, like secret surveillance of citizens, secret monitoring of phone calls of world leaders and Joe the Plumber.  Secret targeting of undesirable political opposition by the IRS, the INS, the EPA, the Dept of the Interior, etc.

 

If they had a secret, the responsible people in the government would fess up at once, without doubt.  Since they haven’t, there’s nothing to see here: move along.

Takes me back to the days when Obama ordered the oceans closed.  Yeah, remember, what, a year ago, he closed the ocean off Florida to punish the voters for the shut-down?  He does so much outrageous, blatantly illegal and stupid crap that you forgot about that one, didn’t you?

 

This is what Fernandez means by “dense pack.”  Obama has so many scandals occurring so quickly that we never get a chance to investigate one before it’s old news and we must move on to the next.  Thus, no scandal ever sticks to him.

It’s the equivalent of a lawyer answering a discovery motion by dumping triplicate copies of every piece of paper in their client’s office on the petitioner, in hopes that anything incriminating gets lost in the blizzard of paper.

As I discussed on the show on Saturday, there are really two sides to Memorial Day, to me.

The first part is the obvious part; remembering those who’ve died to keep this country free.

There are many of them; well over a million men and women have died in the service of this country, in wars big – the Civil War, World War 2 – and small (the Philippine Insurrection, Desert Storm).

And their memory – and the ones that lived, and are with us – deserve a world of thanks.

———-

A friend of this blog – a Navy veteran, as it happens – posted this on Facebook late last week:

Good morning all! It’s Memorial day weekend again.

Instead of exhorting patriotism and thankfulness from folks who don’t want to hear it I’d like to remind you that our government is keeping tabs on all of us. They are flying drones over our homes and collecting our communications. There are cameras *everywhere* taking our pictures, recording our movements. Our local police are now a military force, equipped with heavy weapons and armor. If you have made any firearm related purchases, or frequent arms related websites, your name is on a list. If you happen to belong to a conservative political group, the IRS has your number, but don’t feel left out Lefties, sooner or later they’ll get around to you too. If this situation is not OK with you, what have you done about it? Written anyone? Called anyone? Shown up in person anywhere to get in your legislators grill?

If you don’t care enough to protect the freedoms so many have died for, please don’t post a bunch of smarmy pictures & canned slogans; I don’t want to hear it.

There’s a place for the simple and the sentimental, of course…

…but the writer is correct; the real challenge facing those of us who haven’t died in the service of this country is to make sure that this country is worthy of their sacrifice.  To make sure that those who died to preserve freedom didn’t die in vain.

Those who founded this country knew perfectly well that the greatest threats to this nation’s freedom weren’t from overseas.

The writer wrote the piece in honor of a comrade…:

CWO3 Mike Sheerin; missing you today brother. Not many left around to pick up the slack you left; nobody at all to fill the shoes.

We’ve been blessed with just the right people to pick up the slack when they’ve been needed.

And these days, we all have slack to pick up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The hot Liberal phrase is “Check Your Privilege.”  They’re even making it amandatory grad school course.

Glib; but useless . . . except as an insult.  And it’s a perfect phrase for a Liberal, as it has no set meaning.

If it means “all White men automatically succeed” it’s plainly wrong: see all the White men who don’t succeed.

If it means “all White men have a leg up and that helps them succeed” it’s plainly wrong: see above, and also see successful non-Whites.

If it means “some White men have a leg up, depending on their birth order, intelligence, athletic ability, parents’ finances, or other factors” it’s so broad as to be useless as an analytical tool to measure societal bias as a component of success.

A phrase that has no set meaning is useless, except for shutting down conversation.  “Check Your Privilege” implies that as a White man, I enjoyed privileges that others did not.  That means I didn’t earn my success, it was handed to me.  As the beneficiary of largess distributed solely by skin color and not by individual effort, I lack the moral authority to tell others how to live their lives to succeed.  It’s akin to “You didn’t build that” with the same implied insult.

In other words, “Check Your Privilege” means “Shut Up, Honky” which ends the conversation and destroys the opportunity for learning.

The worst part?  We should engage in self-examination, for our own good. “There, but for the grace of God, go I” is an acknowledgment that we all have a leg up on somebody and it’s generally nothing we earned, it’s some advantage we were given by God.

Aborting my endeavor to understand my place in the universe by shaming me for what I can’t control – my skin color – is perverse.

Joe Doakes

It’s distressing to see the extent to which “education” has become “learning how to shut down inquiry”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another feel-good law passed by Minnesota Democrat-controlled legislature.  If your cell phone is stolen, the cell phone company must do something to switch it off so thieves can’t use it.

Private industry already offers that service – you call the cell phone provider to report your phone stolen and they shut it off.

There are two ways to kill a phone: the Hard Kill that turns the phone into a brick permanently, and the Soft Kill that shuts it off temporarily, but we have no control over which option your cell phone company takes so if the phone is lost but recovered, it still may be unusable.

Worse, industry experts don’t think it’ll solve the problem because thieves can work around the shut-off with SIM cards and computer program.

Providing a mandatory service costs the cell phone provider money.  The state isn’t funding this service.  So your cell phone rates will go up to pay for other people’s carelessness.

The U of M Police Chief who claims guns are often used to steal cell phones on campus is LYING.  He must be, the U of M is a “gun-free” zone.

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how little the DFL accomplished this past session that wasn’t entirely “feel-good”.

Katie Kieffer – her website and her book.

Marty Seifert and Dave Thompson are both running for the GOP nomination for Governor.

Mark Marshall is working on kickstarting financing for the story of the SS Sultana.

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