… If it can survive this:
A Valentine’s Day dinner date – at White Castle.
I mean sure, if you’re part of a couple that shares the same, surreal sense of humor – like the one that whomever at White Castle corporate came up this idea must share – I say go for it!
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Star Tribune finally deigns to report that Department of Public Safety altered the Application to Carry a Pistol form, to include more than a dozen illegal questions. Heather Martens is fine with that.
Heather Martens . . . said some of the questions on the form reveal information that may not turn up in a background check. Further, she said, where 80 percent of the state’s gun deaths are by suicide, even the simplest questions may get honest answers. “I could say that some of those questions are very important questions, and there’s no downside to asking them,” she said. “I wish they asked everybody who is buying a gun, ‘Are you planning on killing somebody with this?’ and a certain number of people are going to say yes. That’s just the way it isFirst, it’s not 80%, it’s less than 70%. Still tragic, but let’s be honest about the numbers.
Second, the percentage doesn’t matter; the questions weren’t asked on an Application to Commit Suicide. Suicides don’t get permits.
Third, as Rep. Tony Cornish pointed out, the questions are irrelevant because only information law enforcement needs is exactly what turns up in a background check.Fourth, notice the smooth slide away from the subject at hand – Permit to Carry – over to her pet peeve – Permit to Purchase. Too bad the reporter doesn’t have a clue about gun rights, so she doesn’t notice she’s being lied to by misdirection.
Joe Doakes
Dear reporters here in Minnesota; why do you keep going to Heather Martens for information on firearms issues?
If you had a source in any other area who always give you false information, and always made your reporting wrong, would you keep going back to them?
There really isn’t any excuse for this, anymore.
It’s Mr. Dilettante’s daughter’s birthday today. And he’s written a wonderful post on the subject, which I think pretty much any parent can identify with.
I have mostly left my kids out of the blog in recent years – mostly because I didn’t want the small minority of creepy stalkers that plague my public life to slop over onto them.
And there are times I resent that.
But until the creeps finally dissolve in their own bile, Mr. D’s piece will certainly suffice.
Barack Obama is highly unpopular in the military.
And yet many of his policies are going over just fine among the troops:
The long-term effects of Obama’s social policies on the military remain unknown. But one thing is clear: He is a deeper unpopular commander in chief among the troops.
According to a Military Times survey of almost 2,300 active-duty service members, Obama’s popularity — never high to begin with — has crumbled, falling from 35 percent in 2009 to just 15 percent this year, while his disapproval ratings have increased to 55 percent from 40 percent over that time.
And before someone chimes in “it’s just anti-gay bigotry in the military, angry over the lifting of the sanction against gay troops”…:
A Military Times poll in 2009 found 35 percent of troops felt that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve in uniform. Five years later, that figure has jumped to 60 percent.
Similarly, open opposition to homosexuality in the military has collapsed. In 2009, 49 percent of troops felt gays, lesbians and bisexuals should not be allowed to serve. In 2014, such disapproval fell to just 19 percent.
Or against women in combat?
From 2011 to 2014, the percentage of survey respondents who felt that all jobs in combat arms units should be opened to women remained unchanged at 24 percent.
But the percentage of troops who felt some combat-arms jobs should be opened up to women — while allowing the military to continue to place some jobs off-limits — increased from 34 percent to 41 percent, while the percentage of respondents who felt the military should not change its policies excluding women from combat arms units fell from 43 percent in 2011 to 28 percent in 2014.
I’m going to suggest that while his policies may not be unpopular among the military, the fact that he’s a terrible leader is.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
Muslim Congressman whose election was funded by terrorists is named to House Intelligence Committee with access to data on Muslim terrorists.
Shouldn’t be a problem. Remember all the Japanese-Americans appointed to War Committees after Pearl Harbor?
At the very least, it’ll save ISIS the bother of hacking into CentCom to find out what the US knows.
Joe Doakes
To be fair, there were all sorts of German-Americans intimately involved in wartime policy during both world wars.
Congressman Ellison’s problem is not that he’s Muslim; there are plenty of American Muslims who are just as American as the next guy.
It’s the fact that his relationship with chair were sponsoring organizations is “nuanced”: while he doesn’t come out of directly say he supports Hamas, preferring to claim to “support the Palestinian people”; he leaves it to the less informed to figure out on their own that “the Palestinian people” are led by Hamas, which killed off most of the competition, and allows little to no dissent.
Minnesota human rights advocates got the Department of Public Safety to roll back a series of intrusive and, I suspect, illegal questions on the Minnesota carry permit application form yesterday.
That’s all to the good – as I noted below.
Now, let’s talk about reporting.
Channel 5’s Beth McDonough reported the story. You can go to the link to watch it; the fella in the maroon shirt is not “Corey Bowman”, but in fact Andrew Rothman, president of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance. Editing glitches happen.
But what I’m going to do is emphasize all of the elements in the online story that are prejudicial, signs of bias, or lead to much bigger questions – or would, if we had a news media that was interested in asking big questions of government, which we largely do not.
I’ll add emphasis to the parts of the story with the problems:
The way you apply for a permit to carry a gun in Minnesota is back to the way it was.
It’s all because of 18 questions on a new application. Some argue it asks for too much information.
Like a lot of Minnesotans Corey Bowman owns a gun, “being a hunter and avid outdoorsman.”
Helping to give Minnesota a reputation as the land of 100,000 guns. [1] In fact, 165,000 people have permits to carry, according to state records—the most ever in Minnesota.
To get a permit to carry, you have to fill out an application, one standard form. But before Tuesday, that application contained 18 fewer questions. Some of those include: whether you’ve been in treatment for substance abuse, fled the state to avoid prosecution or if you’ve been convicted of a crime as a juvenile.
Those questions lasted less than 36 hours online, because of backlash from gun rights enthusiasts. [2]
“At worst, it’s creating dozens of additional opportunities for somebody to make an accidental mistake that results in the denial of their permit application or even criminal charges,” according to Andrew Rothman with the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.
The now-former application said the information was required, leaving the impression the permit couldn’t be processed without all the questions answered. And that’s okay with Corey Bowman. [3]
“These are the kind of questions that would pick out the people that don’t need to have the firearms,” [4] Bowman said.
The Department of Public Safety told us it updated the permit to carry form to reflect changes made by lawmakers in 2014. [5]
So let’s go through them one by one:
More on this, hopefully, tomorrow.
The state Department of Public Safety, operating outside the bounds set by the Legislature, added a series of additional questions to the online (and at some point, one presumes, print) Minnesota carry permit application form.
Some of those include: whether you’ve been in treatment for substance abuse, fled the state to avoid prosecution or if you’ve been convicted of a crime as a juvenile.
The backlash from Minnesota gun owners got those changes removed in a day and a half.
The Minnesota Republican Party could learn a lot from Minnesota’s Second Amendment human rights activists.
Sure, there’s bad news. Or should I say, Bad News.
Back at noon with that.
Well, other than the whole “Cold War” thing…
Update: not really a Churchill quote? Perhaps.
Too good to fact check? Yep.
Fake but accurate? Oh, hell yeah.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
When someone says “Not All Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims,” Liberals respond “What about Oklahoma City bombing?”
The Oklahoma City bombing occurred in 1995 – twenty years ago. Since that time, Wikipedia lists nearly 100 terror attacks by Muslims.
The blast in Oklahoma City killed or injured about 800 people. Muslim terrorists killed and injured more than that in following 5 years alone.
McVeigh and Nichols were Lone Wolves, unaffiliated with any larger movement seeking to change American policy. Tim McVeigh was executed and Terry Nichols is serving 161 consecutive life sentences in federal prison. They pose no future risk.
Muslims, on the other hand, commit fresh atrocities with disturbing frequency. They are expressly following a long-range plan to convert America into a Muslim nation under sharia law. Their on-going risk is palpable.
“All Muslims are terrorists” is exaggeration for conversational effect . . . but not much
Joe Doakes
i’m going to disagree with Joe, but only in the last paragraph. It is a big exaggeration.
The worlds two largest Muslim states – India and Indonesia – have very little in the way of secular terror. Or at least not in the sense that you see it in the Middle East. Oh, yes, Hindus and Muslims go added hammer and tongs in India – but that’s less a religious than ethnic dispute. As, indeed, are most “religious wars”.
And while we in the Twin Cities have seen some concerning signs among some Somali immigrants, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants to the United States came here for the same reasons many of our forefathers did; to scape the internal, debilitating, petty squabbling in our ancestral homelands.
Bob Collins at MPR notes that with falling gas prices, the mathematics of hybrid cars works out a lot more slowly:
According to the Associated Press, if energy prices don’t move much — and, yes, we know they will — then the payback period now is longer than the life expectancy of the car.
AP took the two popular hybrids — the Toyota Prius and the Nissan Leaf — and compared the payback period from July to now.
Toyota Prius
Approximate price premium: $4,300
Annual fuel savings based on July gas price: $534
Payback years: 8.1
Annual fuel savings based on current gas price: $313
Payback years: 13.7
Nissan Leaf
Approximate price premium, including electric vehicle tax credit: $7,330
Annual gasoline savings based on July gas price: $796
Payback years: 9.2
Annual gasoline savings based on current gas price: $281
Payback years: 25.8
Hm – maybe that’s why the MPR crowd has been throwing spitballs at the Bakken oilfields all these years…
Longtime friend of this blog Virginia Keegan – the long-suffering wife of retired publican Terry Keegan – is quite the artist.
And she’s in the art business now.
And it would be fantastic if you’d check out her website!
Two quick points as background:
“I can’t deal with that kind of management,” Zhang said, recalling the whole process of interviewing over the phone in October, flying out to Minnesota in early November, learning about the job, and preparing to move. “Don’t tell a whole class that they’re super special, awesome, and perfect for the job if you’re gonna treat us simply as another expense.”
Mr. Zhang: Sorry you got laid off before you even started. But let’s try to get two things straight, here:
First: this may be in conflict with what Target’s recruiting staff, to say nothing of the professors at whatever $40K a year degree mill you just finished attending, told you – but you’re not super special, awesome and perfect. You are units of talent – or, give your age, potential talent – that a company will measure against its needs.
Second: all management are like that. Oh, they don’t all rescind job offers – but every last one of them measures expenses against bottom line.
And “an expense” is exactly what you are. At best, you’re an “investment” subject to return on investment calculations, just like you learned in business school. That Target sometimes does that clumsily? You could have asked anyone in the Twin Cities IT market about that…
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to it. Or whine to the City Pages. It’s your call.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Everybody knows warfare has changed since David’s tribe fought Goliath’s tribe.
Persians, Greeks and Romans developed large-group tactics for soldiers and ships.
European nations adapted tactics to weapons (volley fire for muskets, artillery fire when machine guns made marching in rows suicidal, then rapid movement by horse, truck or helicopter to outmaneuver and encircle the enemy).
Earlier generations of warfare depended on draftees forced to obey orders. The Geneva Conventions are based on the notion that common soldiers aren’t the driving intellect behind the war and so should be treated decently when captured.
What to make of groups that don’t fit this model? Take the Vietnam Anti-War “movement:” Students for Democratic Society held teach-ins, Weather Underground bombed government offices while Symbionese Liberation Army robbed banks and blew up police cars . . . all generally intended to change American policy at home and abroad, but fought with no conscript soldiers or top-down organization.
How should we deal with groups united by a common belief, staffed with volunteers, trained and willing to kill to influence policy but wearing no uniforms and following no “Rules of War,” selecting their own targets and loosely affiliated with – but not controlled by – any central authority? American Revolutionary Minutemen. French Resistance. German Wolverines.
Muslims Jihadis?
Joe Doakes
The traditional answer? Fight them with more of the same…
The House GOP caucus is making some encouraging noises these days; speaker of the house Kurt Daudt is putting the kibosh, for the session, on funding for the Southwest light rail pork train:
Daudt said the 16 mile light rail line is not a priority for House Republicans .
“We are not interested in moving forward on the Southwest light rail project. I think we need to get real with our priorities in Minnesota on how we spend our transportation dollars. Our plan is to spend them on roads and bridges.”
Gov. Mark Dayton said he isn’t willing to fund the Southwest Light Rail project until the Minneapolis Park Board’s objections are resolved. The park board is funding a study to determine whether a deeper, more expensive tunnel is a better option to protect city parkland than the Metropolitan Council’s plan that features a shallow tunnel.
Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, said Senate Democrats are committed to funding the project.
Dibble, who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee, released his transportation funding package today. It would rely on $800 million in new revenue through a wholesale gas tax hike, and higher license tab fees. The plan also borrows $576 million for new roads and bridges and includes a half cent sales tax in the metro area to pay for transportation projects.
It’s good to see the House GOP come out of the gate taking a serious stance on something. It’d have been nice to have seen more of this during, say, the Vikings Stadium jamdown, but better late than never.
More importantly? The GOP controls half of a third of Minnesota’s government. We get it – negotiation and compromise is going to be involved. But it’s so good to hear House GOP leadership smell the coffee, and stop leading negotiations with the “compromise”.
In the days since the Paris Charlie Hebdo and Jewish Deli massacres, it’s become fashionable in media circles to say, in one language or another, “I Am Charlie Hebdo”.
I’m not.
The French paper was sort of like the American satirical institution South Park – with an unhealthy dose of that traditional drug of the European idle elite, mindless and often nihilistic pseudointellectualism. And among that class’ fatal conceits in the days since the massacre is the idea that free speech will win out over terror.
It’s BS, of course:
Freedom and individual liberty can, and must, win over terror; “The pen is mightier than the sword” could only have been written by someone who never had to bet his life, and certainly not his family’s lives, on it.
Against civil, political opponents, speech is fine; against those who’d kill you, our freedoms need a more aggressive, tangible defense.
But Charlie Hebdo was not the criminals; the terrorists were.
Along with big media outlets like the AP and the NYTimes, I’ve been asked why I don’t run Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. Unlike the AP and the Times, I’m not a hypocrite – I don’t get any particular kick out of offending peaceful, law-abiding members of any faith just because I can. Most Muslims, especially in America, want nothing to do with violent Shi’ite or Wahhabi extremism; I feel no need to piddle on their faith to stick it to terrorists…
…especially because my “beat” in Minnesota, and we have plenty of thin-skinned personality cultists in this state who don’t take satire well:
Anyway – just as the best defense against bad speech is better, louder, good speech (which this blog and my show are), the best defense against a bad guy with a gun remains…:
…a good guy, or gal, with a gun; uniform optional and, in extremis, not strictly necessary.
Satire is many things; it is not bulletproof.
Two weeks from today – January 26 – will be the first annual MInnesota Gun Owners Lobby Day (MNGOLD).
It’ll start with a rally in front of the Capitol.
After that, we – you, me, all of us – will do something that normally only highly-paid union stooges get to do; lobby the legislature. We’ll go inside, and politely, fairly and civilly meet with every single legislator, and let them know face to face that we’re watching, and that we vote.
Arrange your time off now! I am!
More details from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter) and the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee (Web, Facebook, Twitter).
…when Barack Obama was going to “restore respect for this nation” abroad?
Either does he. The US was absent, in body and spirit, from a rally that even had Mahmoud Abbas and Benyamin Netanyahu walking together.
He really, really is a terrible president.
Some say last week’s attack in Paris underscores a change in terrorist tactics – from high-overhead, difficult attacks on “hard” targets (targets that are in some way defended), like the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, the USS Cole, and even US airliners on 9/11, to “soft targets” like the Nairobi Mall, schools in Pakistan and Nigeria, tourist hotels and synogogues, and rooms full of recalcitrant journalists in cities where guns are banned in fact or effect.
It’s a trend that intelligence officials say makes the fight against terrorist threats more complex and potentially more disturbing because the kinds of attacks now grabbing global headlines require far less planning and are harder to detect and disrupt.
It’s not a new trend, of course; after 9/11, Al Quada attacked a disco in Bali, buses and trains in London and Madrid, and countless other “soft” targets. And the PLO was massacring Israeli school children in their kibbutz classrooms and buses (the 1970 Avivim Massacre, the Kiryat Shmona massacre, and the Ma’alot Massacre) over forty years ago.
There are those who say the answer is to give police and intelligence even more power than they already have – which makes sense on the one hand, and pushes us further down the slippery slope toward having no freedom at all, in which case the terrorists will have not only won, but they’ll keep killing people anyway.
The Israeli examples are instructive, of course; after the three heart-wrenching massacres I list above (which killed 42 school children altogether), the Israelis started allowing teachers to carry legally-permitted guns in the classroom. Over time, that morphed into security guards, which I think is a step back, but the point is they turned “soft targets” into “hard targets”.
In parts of the US, “soft targets” are a little harder; many, many people have made themselves into “harder targets” with their legally-permitted firearms, to the chagrin of not a few murderers (spree killers rather than terrorists, although to the would-be victim, the distinction is secondary).
And Minnesota is one of those places with a fairly enlightened civilian carry permit law. It could be better – see Arizona, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming – but it’s gotten better over the past decade.
So Minnesota targets should be just that little bit “harder”, right?
Oh, no.
(Sad trombone).
Back to the drawing board there.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
My work now has Microsoft Lync, an instant messaging system intended for internal communications. It’s an alternative to inter-office mail, e-mail, fax, telephone or walking down the hall to talk to somebody at their desk.
Why do we need it another form of internal communication? E-mail is retained on servers which costs money, and retained e-mails are discoverable in lawsuits. Instant messages won’t tie up storage space on servers (which will save money) and won’t be discoverable in litigation.
Except . . . we’re government. EVERYTHING we do should be discoverable, that’s the point of Sunshine Laws. And if we don’t want to pay to store e-mail, then don’t store it – establish a retention policy and delete everything after a short time.
Joe Doakes
At my most recent employer, every Lync session started with a notice that *everything* you wrote and presented was being recorded.
But it wouldn’t astound me if Ramco used Lync to skirt the rules…
Free speech is a wonderful thing, and a cornerstone of democracy…
…but “sending a message” will save not a single life.
Here’s Better Ed.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
For weeks, minesweepers had combed the vast expanse of the ocean to the south of Luzon, the major island in the Philippine archipelago. Filipino guerrillas had begun operating in the open in the south of the massive island, and the Japanese had even heard reports of paratroopers and gliders operating in the nearby countryside. U.S. warplanes constantly bombed Japanese positions in southern Luzon. The location of the Allied invasion of Luzon seemed obvious.
It was all an elaborate ruse. The “paratroopers” were dummies. The guerrillas, minesweepers and bombers – diversions. The real target for the start of the liberation of the Philippines was further north, at Lingayen, far to the north of Manila. And unfortunately for American landing troops on January 9th, 1945, the Japanese had not been fooled in the slightest.
—
He Returned: MacArthur wades ashore Leyte in Oct of 1944. Luzon, the main Philippine island, was viewed publicly as the “real” start of the liberation of the country – a liberation most of the U.S. command fought against conducting
…when Jerry Falwell brought his squad of goons to the office of Hustler magazine, and killed everyone on the staff when they defamed him?
No?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If you still needed proof that Establishment Republicans were just as committed to status quo as Democrats, this would be the clincher.
Joe has a point – although I’m going to wait to see how the GOP conference votes on actual policy issues, rather than internal niggling.
If they screw the pooch on Keystone XL, IRS hearings, defunding Obamacare and the like, wake me up.
Yesterday, the House moved past the crabbling over the Speaker post, and moved on to substantive policy.
The House passed a bill repealing one of Obamacare’s most toxic provisions – the definition of 30 hours a week as “full time”, which has put (literally) countless people out of work:
Republicans set the showdown as an initial test of how many Democrats would be willing to defect against a lame-duck president and after the GOP relentlessly attacked Obamacare in November’s election campaigns, riding those attacks to big gains.
The legislation would repeal the provision that defines the 30-hour-per-week work threshold that determines when businesses have to face the health insurance coverage mandate. Critics say it scraps the traditional 40-hour workweek and takes pay out of Americans’ pockets because some employers are cutting hours to below 30 a week to get around the law.
Obama will override the veto – and if everyone votes as they did today, the veto will stand. And every single Democrat that votes to override will be on record opposing the will of the 2014 majority of voters.
And the first big wedge point of the 2016 will be put in place.
Then, it’ll become a battle to increase the attention span of the American voter – on the left and the right…
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