I’m a conservative, but I oppose the Death Penalty which is why I oppose the Death Penalty.
In this case, because “settled science” has become unsettled, leading one to the undeniable recognition that many innocent people were convicted, and one innocent man executed, for murders it appears the “science” of the time did not prove they committed.
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!
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If you’ve got sixteen minutes to spare, here’s an answer to the question “so was the E Street Band ever any more than three chords and a big finish?”
That’s “Kitty’s Back” – a deep deep cut from 1974’s The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle,from 1975’s legendary Hammersmith Odeon gig.
It’s frustrating, sometimes, to observe that the E Street Band hasn’t played anything like this in a couple of decades.
In the past, I’ve “joked” that anyone with an Ivy League degree should be disqualified from “public service”.
It’s a “joke” – I keep using the scare quotes, because it’s only barely a joke – because over-educated fools have First Amendment rights, too.
But to paraphrase Dennis Prager, it takes years of the “finest” education this country offers to make someone as ill-informed as Representative Ryan Winkler, who represents west-metro Saint Louis Park.
Winkler – known to many on and off Capitol Hill as “The Eddie Haskell Of The Legislature” – rocketed to national fame last year by calling Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”, after which the Harvard-educated legislator pled ignorance that it was considered a racist insult.
This week? Big strong Harvard lawyer Ryan Winkler needs to tell those dumb widdle wimmins who watch babies and change bedpans all day how to run their businesses. This from Twitter on Monday, in re the SCOTUS decision on childcare provider unionization:
@RepRyanWinkler: Union organizing is our best hope for equal pay for women and creating living wage jobs. Five activists on the Supreme Court can’t stop it.
Bear in mind, Winkler is speaking about unionizing daycare and home care providers – people (largely but not entirely women) who have created their own living wage jobs,with pay that varies but is enough to keep a lot of people doing the work for years and years; nobody gets drafted into the daycare business, right?
Our friend Nancy LaRoche – chair of the 5th CD GOP – took at whack at Winkler’s reasoning.
In response, Winkler puts on his best Roger Stirling impression in showing those dumb broads their place (emphasis added):
@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Unions raise wages. Dues are a small fraction of the financial benefit unions provide. Childcare activists are foolish.
I’ll just let that quote rattle around on its own for a bit. “Childcare activists are foolish”, says the Harvard-trained lawyer.
Of course, I sat through those hearings, and talked with those providers; the unions provide no “benefit” to providers whatsoever.
They don’t “negotiate for better salaries” for the workers, because the workers are contractors working directly for families and patients. There will be no union rep sitting in on the meetings between parents and the daycare providers!
They don’t “provide” any “training” for the providers that they’re not required by state law to provide themselves already to keep their licenses.
They don’t deal with work conditions, because those are already part of their state licensing conditions.
In short, Winkler is either utterly ignorant, or lying.
He also replied to a shot from MNGOP chair Keith Downey:
@RepRyanWinkler: @KeithSDowney Nobody is forcing anybody to unionize. Why do you oppose letting child care providers vote on whether to collectively bargain?
Because it won’t just be “child care providers?” Because the unions have been organizing ringers, people who aren’t licensed providers but who will vote to unionize. All the DFL’s talk about “letting providers vote” is a sham. Again – either Winkler is ignorant, or he’s lying.
And again to LaRoche:
@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Nothing stops them from running their business, they get to decide on and run a union, and negotiate higher rates. Good deal.
They already negotiate their rates (and they’re already high; Minnesota has some of the highest daycare costs in the country). They don’t get to “run” any union; Javier Morillo (of AFSCME) and Elliot Seid (of the SEIU) do. And while they will have nothing to do with “negotiating” the “rates” that the providers charge, they will be right there collecting those dues, and kicking $2 million a year of them back to the DFL, with Ryan Winkler being a recipient.
Winkler and the DFL expect you, the voter, especially the female voter who is most likely to be working in home daycare or personal care, are too stupid to know any better.
On the one hand? It’s just Eddie Haskell Ryan Winkler. Nobody who’s political brain isn’t on autopilot – like, apparently, the DFL voters in his district – takes him all that seriously.
But of the autopilot set? Winkler is clearly being groomed by the DFL for bigger and better things (or was, until the “Uncle Tom” flap – and the media has buried that story effectively enough for the DFL to start easing Winkler back into the spotlight).
But does the DFL want to identify with this sort of paternalistic sexism?
I gave myself a chuckle, there. All sins are forgiven the DFL True Believer.
Unionization will create not one single daycare job; it will raise no personal care attendant’s pay; it will improve not a single working care provider’s working conditions. Not one.
Walter Hudson smacks Winkler down good.
A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 33 percent of Americans pick Obama as the worst President since World War 2. Dubya comes in second at 28 percent.
So let’s try it this way: Let’s rank the presidents since WW2.
In the comments, respond with your rankings of the presidents since WW2, in order from worst to best.
Here’s the complete list: Re-order them and leave them in the comments.
My vote is below the fold.
I got this email from one of the socialist parties whose email list I somehow got onto; it’s by one Nicole Troxell, a Sociology professor in Kentucky:
When I was 19 years old, a college professor changed my life. I took his Feminist Political Thought course and realized for the first time that I could be smart and capable. …
When I was 19 years old, a college professor changed my life. I took his Feminist Political Thought course and realized for the first time that I could be smart and capable. I decided I wanted to give students what he had given me. I talked to professors about what it was like to teach college and it seemed perfect. There would be time for artistic and intellectual work, a chance to foster curiosity and critical thinking, building community, freedom to work a flexible schedule mostly from home, good wages and benefits, and opportunities to contribute to research.
In other words, she thought she’d hit the jackpot; getting paid big money to spend very few hours per week teaching an utterly valueless discipline.
What could go wrong?
No one ever mentioned the word “adjunct” and I didn’t know what it meant until I took my first teaching job at a community college. I thought an adjunct position was probably a trial period for a full-time post that was sure to open soon. I was still full of hope for my career.
Today I have classes that run four, five, six, 12, and 16 weeks long at three to five different schools. I work more hours than a full-time college professor, yet I get paid less than half as much. I work so many hours that I sometimes average less than the minimum wage.
That moment when practicioners of valueless trades almost, but don’t quite, realize that their trade has no value.
I am working hard and not seeing tangible fruits for my labor. I can’t afford health insurance, even under the Obama plan; and I have nothing saved for retirement. I can’t pay my student loans and barely manage to pay basic living expenses. Occasionally I get warm fuzzy compliments from students who become passionate about what they learn from me, but mostly my poor students get a tired, overworked, unenthusiastic teacher who has to try hard to “fake it until I make it.” Why do I keep doing this? Simply because it was my dream to teach college.
Sucks, doesn’t it? I hit that same wall when I was 29; It was my dream to do major market radio, but I was making $8 an hour with two kids to feed and #3 on the way. I had to adapt.
So is “adaptation” in the future for Ms. Troxell?
Adjuncts are not without hope, however. Thousands are organizing around the country in unions like Service Employees International (SEIU)…Adjuncts can shake things up and galvanize change by urging their local unions to start organizing. Better wages and benefits would take away the incentive for adjunct positions and hopefully encourage universities to employ more full-time teachers.
Er, yeah. Hopefully.
Or – more likely – they’d realize, as value-conscious students are, that “women’s studies” and sociology are of no real value to them (beyond, maybe, general requirement survey courses, and even there I’d be pissed at any college that required me to waste any of my hard-earned time on either), and they’ll contract those departments even further, leading non-tenure-track academics to careers in insurance, real estate, and fast food.
Just saying.
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
If the economy is as bad as the first quarter economic report indicated, why is the stock market so high? Powerline supplies a clue.
We know that correlation does not prove causation, but since the Standard and Poors Weekly 500 stock index so closely tracks federal government stimulus spending since President Obama took office in 2009, it’s fair to ask if we’re headed for another stock market bubble, one entirely of government’s making.
Joe Doakes
Fair, but – until we get a media that isn’t serving as a praetorian guard and, hopefully, a Congress full of economic realists – pretty much hopeless.
We warned you. Oh, yes we did.
“When you raise the taxes on the parts of our society that produce wealth, the wealth moves”
That’s especially true when the taxes you’re raising make the producers of wealth – companies, in this case – less competitive in a global marketplace with other companies that produce wealth and get less of a tax hit.
Two weeks ago, it was Medtronic packing up its corporate plantation moving to Ireland for a much, much, much better tax rate.
This week? Word that Walgreens is planning a similar inversion with a company in Switzerland.
And after news that Nash Finch and Advance Auto Parts are leaving Minnesota largely because of the DFL’s tax orgy, and Red Wing Shoes and Laurence Transportation shelving major expansions because of that same tax policy, i’m wondering how much longer the DFL can hide behind the the headlines about Minnesota’s phantom, low unemployment rate.
(Which translates to “low unemployment in the metro, where all the Fortune 1000 companies are, with the market a little less reassuring outstate…)
After a month of so of coercion by Michael Bloomberg and his chorus of paid puppets, in a campaign that cost the former New York mayor and chief scold millions, Target turned around and did…
…next to nothing.
Oh, they asked gun owners not to carry in their stores – meaning “carry openly”.
Now, let’s be honest; if I, Mitch Berg, Second Amendment activist, owned a general-market retail operation, I would also ask people, nicely, not to carry openly in my store. Money from the tiny minority of anti-gunners, and the larger minority of people who are scared, put-off or confused about guns, is just as good as anyone else’s, and people who are opposed to or irrationally afraid of gun are a solid 20+% of the market in most major metro areas – a small part of the market, but bigger than the open carry activist minority. Why send them all running away from my store?
Target is asking, not telling, gun owners to please not agitate the ninnies among their customers, thank you very much.
For all you open carry supporters in the audience: I get it. A right not exercised is a right that can be taken by default. But the same goes for the rights of private property owners; they’ve got a right to give the customers the experience they, not you, design for them. And they’ve decided – not incorrectly – that open carry will scare away more ninnies than it will bring in shooters.
So while the open-carry movement may call this a setback (or a call to action), for the mainstream of the second amendment movement, it’s a small win, or at the very least “not a loss”.
The Chicago Police discovered a “sniper nest” atop a public parking garage near a Chicago college:
Officials say they found a high-powered semi-automatic rifle about a block from the campus of Kennedy King college, near 64th and Lowe last Thursday. Officers say the nest was found on top of a garage across from a soccer field on campus.
Snipers. Deadly, cold-eyed marksmen…
A US Marine sniper. With his rifle. With a long, match-grade barrel, to use the most of the high-powered round’s power to give the bullet the highest velocity and straightest flight path possible.
…with weapons that can reach out hundreds of yards – sometime over a mile – to put a bullet precisely into a human head.
At the scene, officers recovered a fully loaded Mac-10.
(SCREAAAAAAAATCH)
A MAC-10?
A MAC-10
The MAC10 is a civilianized version of the MAC-10 submachine gun – an ultra-short-barreled weapon designed to “Spray and Pray”; fire 20 shots a second at point-blank range. But being civilianized, it doesn’t “spray” – it’s semi-automatic. It has a four-inch barrel – the same as a modestly-respectable handgun. But it’s not even as accurate as a modest-quality handgun (and even a high-quality target handgun is useless beyond about 30-50 yards). The MAC’s “sights” are a v-notch cut in a piece of steel. It’s got a trigger pull like an old Mattel cap gun. And it fires pistol ammunition, meaning by definition it is not “high-powered”.
It is a glorified, heavy, badly-balanced, expensive handgun, with an effective, aimed range of about 30 feet. Not “a block and a soccer field and change”.
Kennedy King officials say they have notified students. Although, it does not appear that anyone on campus was ever in any danger.
Indeed.
I know that the NRA and other Second Amendment groups offer classes to journalists about how not to sound stupid when talking about firearms. Someone might want to send the TV station behind this story a gift certificate.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Headline reads: Pope says Communists are Christians.
Well, maybe. Hard to tell what he actually said, much less meant, from such a brief article. But if the article is accurate, I’d suggest the Holy Father is confused.
Christ lived in an era when there was no welfare so life was Root Hog, or Die. That system forced every man to focus on building and preserving wealth for himself and his loved ones (family, tribe). And that relentless focus on gathering wealth made some people selfish, miserly, stingy, greedy, covetous. Those are not endearing qualities.
Christ’s message of giving was not a call for government redistribution, but a call for individuals to voluntarily donate. Paying your taxes to Caesar requires no inner contemplation, no step back to look at your life, no reassessment of what’s important, no thankfulness for what you have, no gratitude for what God has blessed you with. Instead, paying taxes to be redistributed fosters resentment that the ants toil while the grasshoppers play – and the grasshoppers get rewarded for indolence while the ants get punished for thrift.
Communism is not Christian, they are polar opposites looking toward the same middle. We all want to eliminate poverty. The question is how. The answer is voluntarily. Nothing else works.
Joe Doakes.
People ask me why I don’t convert to Catholicism.
Liturgical matters aside, the presence of a leader and bureaucracy that can use religion to push hogwash like Francis and his inner circle have been pushing is a big part of it.
It was July 1, 1984. I took off from Jamestown at around 5AM in – what else? – my ’73 Monte Carlo with a 396, Fuellie heads and a Hurst on the floor, and drove through a long, hot July day. Poring over my Amoco map of the Twin Cities – where I’d never driven before – I got to Saint Paul, pulled off the Marion Street exit and parked up by the Cathedral (where a friend of mine had parked the car when we drove down to see The Who in 1982), and made my way down Kellogg to downtown Saint Paul around 2 in the afternoon.
I wandered down to Saint Peter and then Wabasha street, back in the days when there were still stores between Fourth and Sixth streets across from Dayton’s and Ecolab, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of downtown Saint Paul.
I did mention I was from North Dakota, right? And that “hustle and bustle” were very relative concepts? Compared to Fargo – the biggest city I’d ever spent serious time in – Saint Paul was kinda hustly and bustly.
In those days, anyway.
Some of the landmarks from my wandering are still there; the Coney Island still has the exact same hand-scrawled paper “Under Renovation” sign today that it had back then, I think; I thought about eating at Mickey’s Diner, but it was too crowded and I wanted a damn beer. Others – the Burger King/Taco Johns in the funny glass building on 5th, across from Daytons; Daytons itself; Brady’s Pub, where I stopped for a burger and a beer for lunch, Gallivan’s – are long gone.
After lunch, I wandered down Fifth to the Plaza in front of the old Civic Center.
The old Saint Paul Civic Center.
It was getting toward three in the afternoon; I heard some noises inside, and it sounded like the band was getting into its soundcheck. The plaza – including the long row of stairs leading to the endless rank of doors – was thronged with people, mostly looking for tickets. I walked past, listening to the sound of a bass guitar tuning up.
And I figured “nothing ventured, nothing gained”.
I walked to the very leftmost of the long row of doors that overlooked 7th and Kellogg, and gave it a furtive tug, expecting to find it locked.
It wasn’t. It pulled open a few inches; I could hear someone tapping on a drum set.
Understand – I was never much of a rule-breaker. I was always terrified of being in trouble.
But I checked to make sure nobody was watching, inside or outside, and slipped indoors.
I hustled across the concourse to a gate, stepped inside…
…and saw the E Street Band, down on the stage, a level below me. Nearest me was the Big Man, with his sax, wearing sweats and a cap. Danny Federici was on the riser behind him, checking registrations on his Hammond. Nills Lofgren was warming up downstage. Max Weinberg tapped drums as the sound guy rang out the room. Gary Tallent played some scales; Roy Bittan noodled on the keyboard. Then they stopped, chatted, and then Max counted four, and they launched into an instrumental of “Glory Days”, as the sound crew adjusted levels.
I grabbed a seat, and watched the band, and listen to the sound guys tweaking the levels, and just marinated in the whole wanton lawnlessness of it all.
About the time the song ended, someone tapped my shoulder. It was a roadie, in a black t-shirt and jeans. I half expected to get my ass kicked – and it would have been worth it, honestly.
“Excuse me, sir…”
“Yeah, I know”, I responded, getting up. “I’ll leave”.
The roadie nodded. “Thanks”. He was downright polite about the whole thing. “Hey, before you go – how did you get in?”
I showed the roadie the unlocked door, and he thanked me as I stepped back out onto the plaza. I walked down to Kellogg…
…as a white Olds Cutlass with a “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band “Born in the USA Tour 1984″ Tour” decal rolled past. In the passenger seat was Bruce.
I waved.
He waved back.
I walked down to Paddy McGovern’s for another beer. I had some time to kill.
So technically that – and not the actual concert, still 5-6 hours away – was the first time I ever saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live.
———-
Eventually – the doors opened at 7, I think – I got into the building legally, found my seat (row 59 on the floor), and waited for the show. And waited.
And waited.
And finally – right around 9PM – the lights went down, the crowd got on its feet, the band filtered onstage in the dark, and a spotlight picked out Springsteen at the mike. He counted off four, and Bittan’s skirling synths and Weinberg’s drums kicked off “Born in the USA”.
The rest of the show? It’s a blur – and yet vast swathes of the show are as clear in my head as if I’d just seen the show:
I think the band stepped out for a brief intermission here.
And then the band left the stage.
And returned a few minutes later to play an encore:
They left the stage again – but the crowd would have none of it.
The concert let out around 1AM. I debouched onto the street with the rest of the crowd, and made a beeline for my car, up by the Cathedral.
And as I walked up Cathedral Hill, I thought – yeah, it ain’t no sin to be glad your alive.
And as I walked up a side street toward my car, I looked back at Saint Paul, all lit up and teeming with people and knew it; I just had to start angling my life plans toward getting out of North Dakota after I graduated.
(For those who were around at the time? No, it was the second night of the tour. I didn’t get tickets for the first night, June 29, at the Civic – the opening night of the entire tour. The one where they filmed the “Dancing in the Dark” video, in which a very young Courney Cox, planted in the audience, was introduced to the world via a “live” vid produced by Brian DePalma. Sure, you remember it.
But it was pretty cool anyway. Here’s a fanpage with a ton of scanned memorabilia from the June 29 show, and a much less complete set of swag and quotes from the show I was at. And here’s the complete audio from the June 29 show – the opening night of the Born in the USA tour, two nights earlier).
Oh, yeah – the ticket? For 59th row on the floor? $16.50.
Target is still under siege from “Michael Bloomberg in Drag” (a more accurate way to refer to “Moms Want Action”, which was always a checkbook advocacy group and is now basically Bloomberg’s pep squad) to ban law-abiding citizens from carrying legally in their stores.
It’s time to let Target know who the real customers are:
Remember – keep it civil. Good manners wins the day. Target’s people have had enough of the shrieking harpies from “Bloomberg In Drag”.
This is for you progressives in the audience. The conservatives and libertarians already know this, so you may skip down to the next post.
A right is something that is endowed to you by your creator, whatever you believe that is, and can not (legitimately) be taken away by any person or government. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Speech, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms, no illegitimate searches and seizures (ooops), and so on. It’s a short list, but a pretty comprehensive one.
The Constitutional Convention. Are they debating whether people have a right to happy hour between 5 and 6 every weekday? I think not.
Rights have one thing in common; they don’t infringe other peoples’ rights. When I exercise my right to speak, it doesn’t take away your right to speak. For that matter, when you talk about taking away my rights – like the Second Amendment – it doesn’t infringe my rights; I need to meet you with more, better speech, and convince more Americans that you’re a ninny. And I do.
But I digress.
There is no right not to be offended – because if we tried to say you had a right not to be offended, then it’d take away someone else’s freedom of speech. If person A makes a statue of the Virgin Mary out of cow dung, Catholic Person B isn’t getting any rights violated; they are fully entitled to show the world why Person A is a terrible artist, or make a statue of Person A out of goat dung, or whatever.
So since it’s been in the news for the past 24 hours, let’s talk about the “women’s right” to birth control.
You women (and men, ahem) have a right to your private life (NSA notwithstanding), and to live your life more or less as you want (yep, there are restrictions on snake-handling and marijuana and raw milk and machine guns and a bunch of other stuff, but work with me here). So go ahead and buy and use birth control!
Sorry, children. Everything that displeases you isn’t bigotry. Even religion.
But you have no right to force other people to buy birth control for you if it violates their beliefs, which are a right and don’t interfere with your rights (as opposed to wants).
Idiot columnistette Jessica Valenti thinks women should have sex *in* Hobby Lobbies nationwide to protest the ruling. Which is great, with two exceptions; 1) five’ll getcha ten the “women” will look like Jessica Valenti 2) That’ll open the door to people splattering guts and gore all over Planned Parenthood clinics. Choose your pointless symbolic gestures wisely, whiny spoiled progressives!
Frankly, you should have no more “right” for you to force anyone else to buy you contraception than I should to force you to buy me ammunition, not because of my religious beliefs (which say nothing about contraception) but because it takes my money. But that brings up an argument about taxation and government that goes way beyond this, and that we should actually have in our society (government should pay for nothing but the court system, defense, and arresting and prosecuting people who materially harm other people), but is a huge tangent from the discussion we’re actually having.
You have a right to use contraception. You have, currently, the legal means to force most people who work for most companies, and all publicly-held companies, to pay for them. You don’t have the right to violate the rights of privately-owned companies’ freedom of religion.
It’s pretty simple, which is of course why you all get it wrong.
A friend of mine from South Minneapolis emails. The bad news? :
Oh great, my favorite local bar and burger place where I have taken many of you is now world famous. The POTUS just had a “Jucy Lucy” at Matt’s. Crap. We’ve been going to this place for decades and now…the place will be known in every corner of the earth. Best kept secret burger joint now will be even more busy. Dang.
The good news? At least he didn’t go to The Nook. You thought it was hard to get into Matt’s even before the POTUS’ visit?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Population of Chicago in 1930: 3.3 million. Crime_in_Chicago”>Number of homicides: 399. Gun control: none.
Population of Chicago in 2010: 2.7 million. Number of homicides: 436. Gun control: plenty.
Chicago in Al Capone’s day was known for gang violence but modern Chicago gangs kill more victims from a smaller pool.
Chicago gangs doing it better.
Joe Doakes
Who says there’s no such thing as progress?
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