On seeing the carnage in Paris, I thought – per usual – “good thing all of the civilians victims were unarmed and utterly helpless, or Mon Dieu knows how bad it could have been!”

France has, by continental standards, a fairly high rate of civilian gun ownership.  But civilian gun laws are as byzantine as California and Washington DC, and for exactly the same reasons.  And the issuance civilian handgun carry permits to carry the kinds of firearms that might have been useful in Paris follows pretty much exactly the same rules as in DC, San Francisco and New York; available only to judges and prosecutors in high-profile cases, or people with enough political clout to sway the bureaucracy; politicians, plutocrats and celebrities with friends in high places.  That’s about it.

The laws, byzantine though they are, didn’t prevent the attackers in Paris from getting fully-automatic Yugoslav-surplus AK47s, the kind that have been illegal in the US for eight decades now, of course.  Laws don’t stop law-breakers.

So – yet again, thugs, criminals and terrorists launch attack on the disarmed.

There’s a reason they don’t do these sorts of attacks in Dallas.

In the days leading up to this week’s ghastly attacks in Paris – which are, justifiably but inevitably, inescapable in the media – there was an event that, in the great scheme of things, might have been more important.

But you’d never know from the American media.

We’ll get back to that.

Between Two Hungry Dobermen:  It’s said that the most dangerous thing to be in the world is a moderate Arab.  For the past eighty years, the first line of tactics among the extremes in Muslim thought – which are a minority among the Islamic community, but which surely do command a disproportionate share of Muslim and Occidental mindshare, pro and con – was to obliterate the “moderates”; those who sought accomodation with the West, those who spoke for reform among the dictatorships and oligarchs and petty monarchs and warlords that had divvied up most of the Muslim world, and especially those who sought to bury the hatchet with the Jews someplace other than in the Jews’ heads.

Going back to the thirties, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – an ally of Hitler, and the first “Palestinian” extremist – didn’t much bother with attacking Jews; most of his energies went into purging Arabs who sought ethnic cleansing with insufficient ardor.

So successful has it been among Palestinians in particular that Al-Fatah, Yassir Arafat’s old group, a group tied to a river of Jewish blood in the seventies and eighties, is considered a “moderate” Palestinian group.

But it’s not just Palestinians.  In 1981, after stepping far out of the ideological box to meet with Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin (himself, not to mince words, a former terrorist) and design a peace with Israel that still stands almost four decades later, Egyptian dictator Anwar El-Sadat was murdered by extreme Islamist elements in his own Army.

Speaking moderation in the Islamic world is extraordinary – and, outside a few enclaves, the US and to a lesser extent India and a diminishing extent Western Europe, extraordinarily dangerous.

Talk Like An Egyptian:  And so Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi’s speech on New Years Day (which coincided with Mohammed’s birthday this year) is more than a little notable.  Not “revolutionary” as some have suggested; he’s not a Muslim Calvin or Luther or Knox.

Still, in a community that is rightfully petrified by eighty years of brutal suppression of moderate opinion, it’s energizing to hear:

“I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. The entire world is waiting for your word … because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands,” el-Sisi said.

“We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person — a person that our country will need in the near future,” the President said…“It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible that this thinking — and I am not saying the religion — I am saying this thinking,” el-Sisi said.

He continued: “This is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! Does this mean that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible!”

As many in the West ask the hitherto-rhetorical question “when will a moderate Muslim speak out against the madness”, here’s  a short answer.

Or it might be.  Naturally, the extremists behind the carnage in Paris ignored Al-Sisi, although they were hardly the audience he was addressing.

Al-Sisi – a former general, at the head of a large, relatively sophisticated and reliable military (although so was Sadat), may be one of few Muslim leaders who could get away with such an affront.  And Islam is hardly monolithic; the rift between Shia and Sunni is just one of many that ensure that there can be no one spokesperson for all, or even most, of Islam.

The speech was no “95 Theses” – but then, that event didn’t resolve its contemporaneous conflict, either – but it’s as close as we’ve seen from the Muslim world in a long, long time.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This case explains the Minnesota law on when you can plead self-defense. The burden is on the Defendant to prove facts to the judge before being entitled to argue self-defense to the jury. The judge decides what defense you can present to the jury. You have no Right to plead self-defense.

That’s fine for this guy, he’s an obvious trouble-maker; but what about the next time a White guy shoots a Black yute and Al Sharpton’s mob shows up? Are we going to get even-handed justice or political theatre that denies God-given rights existing long before the Constitution was adopted?

I showed this case to an acquaintance, who said:

“As for the question whether this Defendant had a reasonable belief of personal threat to his well-being: Of course he did. Only White, liberal, former-prosecutors-appointed-judges don’t know that.

In this Defendant’s world, in the cesspool that he swims, the true state of affairs, the reality, the actual fact is that yes, whoever is banging on the door at that time of night is more likely than not armed, and is almost certainly there to do you harm. It’s as true for a Black man living in North Minneapolis as for an Italian in Brooklyn or a Cuban in Miami.

Liberals can’t reconcile this reality with their self-delusion as to the underclass. They believe the Poor are Victims and Victims are Passive, except when they’re erupting in well-deserved riots against Rich White people. The notion that people in the under-class routinely behave worse than people in the middle class is contrary to The Narrative. Liberals prefer their vision of reality to the Defendant’s objective reality and thus deny him a chance to justify his actions.”

I think Minnesota’s law is too strict. If you want to argue self-defense, you ought to be allowed to. The jury can sniff out when it’s a bogus
claim. Preventing Defendants from putting on a defense is bad policy.

Joe Doakes

i’m trying to imagine a group that would push back harder against having their discretion pared back than prosecutors and the police; judges would probably qualify.

But Joe is right. That would’ve been one of the handy benefits of the “Stand Your Ground” law the Governor vetoed a few years back.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. The Vikings are green with envy.

Nothing signals a shift to a bold, decisive new direction like re-electing the same weasels who led us down the path we’re on now.

“But the GOP majority got bigger, the Speaker must be doing something right.” No, dummy, you have more Conservative Republicans elected DESPITE the Speaker sabotaging conservatives at every opportunity. The grassroots voters are fed up with Obama AND with spineless Republicans who hand the Democrats a free pass on spending for all of 2015 and then dither and quibble about maybe suing the President over immigration, when Congressional Republicans ought to be using every tactic, trick and tool in the box to rein the President in and shut him down.

We got a surge of Republicans elected in 1992 when Newt Gingrich campaigned on the Contract With America. What we don’t have today is a formal set of ideas to enact and somebody willing to implement them.

Joe Doakes

The good news? It was the most hotly contested speaker racing over 100 years.

The bad news? Voters don’t keep track of history.

Perhaps worse still? I’m starting not to really care about what the reasons and excuses are anymore.

There has been a tsunami of dismay over the re-election of John Boehner as Speaker of the House.

I share some – some – of that dismay.  I’d rather have seen someone who could give us, conservatives, a start toward doing something that’s been direly needed this past six years; get conservatives whipped up and ready to come out and volunteer, call, stuff envelopes, and work to get conservatives elected.

We’ll come back to that.

Ralph Benko at Forbes makes the case for Boehner:

Boehner may well be the worst thing to happen to progressives since December 26, 1991… when Gorbachev dissolved the USSR. The left understands this better than does the right.

Boehner’s problem with conservative firebrands seems to derive from the fact that he is all action, no talk. (Or as they would put it in Texas, he’s all cattle, no hat.) Rather than indulging in fierce rhetoric Boehner has parlayed into big wins a small stake and an impossibly weak political hand — a narrow and fractious Republican majority in one of three branches (with a “fourth estate,” the media, largely hostile to conservatives).

My torch-and-pitchfork wielding colleagues aren’t getting how deeply conservative is John Boehner. They are looking for Genghis John while what’s in front of them is Baby Face Boehner. Lethal to liberals, just not showy.

It is time to see Boehner as the conservative he is.

Read Benko’s case, and either be convinced, or not.

I’m of a couple of minds about this:

A Mechanic Versus A Leader:  The Speaker of the House, aside from actually setting the House’s agenda, is in charge of seeing to all of the mechanical and procedural details involved in passing (or blocking!) legislation.

And for all of his orange-tanning, crying and occasional cave-ins (strategic?) to the Administration, Boehner certainly has been that.  Benko certainly spells out that case well.

But the tsunami of conservatives who crashed the Capitol switchboard yesterday wanted a symbol installed, a message sent.

They wanted someone like that other great partisan firebrand Speaker, who inspired so many to get off the fence and leap into action…

…um…

…wait.  Who was the last Speaker of the House to take on a partisan leadership role?  I mean, yeah, Pelosi.  OK – when was the last successful one?

I get it.  Conservatives want a win.  They crave some sign that the momentum they picked up last November is still moving along.  Believe me, I understand.

So who was the conservative firebrand leader in the House who heard that call, and stepped up to be carried to the rostrum on the base’s rhetorical shoulders?

Louie Gohmert?

At the last minute?

What does that tell you?

The Speaker’s job is not to lead the base.  The Speaker’s job is to lead the caucus (and, incidentally, the House).

Will Boehner do the job well?  Well, after one whopping day as Speaker of the House in a Republican, as opposed to divided Congress, it’s hard to tell.

Wait – you didn’t like his approach in November and September?  When Boehner was speaker of a House that was fighting a defensive battle against a Democrat President and Senate?  It was a different Congress.

Make no mistake – if Congress doesn’t make some conservative hay this session, it’ll be high time to primary the hell out of people.  But change in Washington happens lamentably slowly.

And that, unfortunately, is the problem.

Glass Jaws:  The cataclysm of conservative disgust was overwhelming, yesterday.

Now, let’s do a reality check.

Yes, the new, Republican-controlled Congress is one day old.  And the Speaker race was decided in the most fractious election in over 100 years – I think Boehner got the message – and if he didn’t, he’ll be returning to the Minority soon.

But this isn’t about Congress.  This is about conservative voters.

Somewhere along the way, a huge number of conservatives started to believe that government, policy and politics were all about single, cataclysmic, litmus-test-to-end-all-litmus-test votes; votes that, if won, would lead to political nirvana, and if lost, lead to forty years in the desert.

This was not that vote.

A vote on defunding Obamacare, or rejecting Obama’s appellate justices, will be that vote.

I’m not sure who to blame for this; perhaps after decades of framing most issues as black and white choices, conservative alt media is reaping the blowback.  Perhaps all the time and effort the Ron Paul and Tea Party movements spent on imbuing their followers with a messianic sense that all things lead either to death or glory is coming back to haunt us.

I don’t know.

But politics – hell, all of life – is more like boxing than wrestling.  Wrestling is all about trying to score the coup de main inside a few minutes – the pin, the catastrophic hold, the big win.

But in boxing, as in politics, as in life, for the vast majority of the world in the vast majority of bouts, it’s about taking punches.  Over and over and over and over and over.  And maybe landing a few, almost never knockouts.  And being the last man standing – not in three minutes, but after fifteen three-minute rounds.

Boehner?  Love him or hate him, this was just one punch.  Shake it off.

While this blog has repeatedly referred to Sally Jo Sorenson of Bluestem Prairie as “one of about five Minnesota liberal bloggers that don’t deserve police surveillance” – not the highest compliment I can give, but the highest warranted under the circumstances – one should not presume that I agree that Ms. Sorenson will go out of her way to tell a story that the DFL doesn’t want, or  pay to have, told.

So with yesterday’s post about the Minnesota Senate “tightening” media credentialing rules, which was signal for including just the bits that fit the DFL’s narrative about media and communications:

Via David Montgomery’s post at the Pioneer Press’s Political Animal blog, MN Senate tightens rules for press credentials and The Uptake’s MN Senate Tightens Media Credential Rule, we learn that ““individuals affiliated with a political organization” can no longer be credentialled as journalists or keep their press pass at the Minnesota Senate.

Now, the mainstream press is noplace to get information about this issue, since they’ve been blissfully above it all from the beginning.  And the Uptake has a bit of a conflict of interest, as it was the DFL’s favoritism toward them (they gave credentials to the stridently partisan Uptake, but denied them to conservatives) in 2010 that led to the whole “Senate Media Rules” fracas in the first place.

Back when the GOP took over the Senate in 2011, then-Senate-GOP-comms guy Michael Brodkorb convened a working group to come up with new rules for media credentialing.  I was part of the group, along with David Brauer.  And we did a really good job; they were among the best, fairest rules in the country, balancing the investment the big mainstream media outlets had made in coverage with the access for alternative media sources.

And to prevent the system from being hijacked by the parties, the rules barred people who were on party payrolls from getting credendialed.  Period.

In 2013, the DFL took control of the Senate:

Montgomery reports:

That’s a pretty broad definition, but the background appears to be related to a blogger named Shawn Towle, who received a Senate press pass while also being paid by the Senate DFL.

Republican senators made a stink about Towle in April of 2014, putting out a press release accusing DFL leader Tom Bakk of “secret payments” to Towle.

Introducing the proposed change today, Bakk described it as “something the rules committee had considerable conversation about near the end of the session last year.”

In other words, Bakk is reiterating the process that we came up with in 2011.  With a great deal of noise, he returned the Senate to the rules it had before.

Thank goodness.

One presumes that the DFL will find some way to sneak Towle, their favorite hit-piece writer, into the room – but it’ll be the traditional Democrat way; rules be damned!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If the cashier at Cub took my money then announced she had a surplus, I’d say she overcharged me. That’s a bad thing.
If the State takes my money then announces it has a surplus, I’m supposed to be thrilled?

In the private sector, a budget starts with a realistic expectation of income, then works in spending that can be afforded.
In government, a budget starts with special interest spending demands on paid-for politicians, who set the income to cover the payoffs.
The equivalent process in the private sector would be monopolistic price fixing by a crime syndicate.
Joe Doakes

Everything you really need to know about government budgeting, you learn from Henry Hill’s soliloquy about Jimmy Conolly from “Goodfellas”.

You know what I mean; the one that goes “business is been bad? F*** you, give me the money”.

Young people are more miserable than ever under Obama, according to the “Young America Foundation” misery index:

Youth unemployment in 2014 was 18.1 percent (18.1 on YMI), with almost six million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in school or work. Many young people are simply giving up on finding employment.

Student loan debt for 2014 rings in at a record-breaking $30,000 (30.0 on YMI). Student debt has risen at an average of six percent per year since 2008, and today, 70% of college seniors graduate with student loan debt. In addition, the job market still hasn’t recovered, leaving many recent graduates with little or no income to pay back their loans.

National debt per capita for 2014 is the highest it’s ever been at $58,437 (58.4 on YMI). Young people will be stuck paying for government debt they had no part in creating, and they’ll have to do it with less discretionary income than ever before because of record-high levels of student loan debt.

Add it all up, and the YMI comes out to an astonishing 106.5 up from 98.6 in 2013.

I think the index needs to weight unemployment higher – it’s a much greater contributor to personal misery than the national debt, which is pretty abstract to most people (so far).

But it remains a fact that the kids that voted for Obama have got to be regretting the choice, someday soon here…

2014 was the sixtieth anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster.

You may not know guitars – but you’ve heard them.

NPR did a pretty decent story on the the anniversary, and the guitar, last week.  Leo Fender designed the “Strat” as the followup to the much-more-conventional but also legendary Telecaster.

A “Telly”

The thing that jumps out at the non-guitar player is the body shape – a radical double-cutaway design (allowing the guitarist to easily get to the highest notes on the neck).

For the musician, there was the vibrato bar – the “whammy bar” – at the bridge, immortalized by a generation of surf-rockers and, in a much-modified form, Eddie Van Halen:

The “whammy bar”, up close

And for guitarists who really, really dig into it?  The “Strat” was an incredibly versatile instrument.

The Strat’s pickups, switch, “pots” (volume and tone knobs) and wiring, from the inside.

Its three “pickups” – the three little oval bars, basically microphones that turn the vibration of the strings into electrical signals that are sent to the amplifier – are connected to a five position switch that allows the guitarist to select which of the three pickups, or which combination, are live.    The one closest to the bridge picks up more treble, and is most useful for playing solos; the one closest to the fingerboard is usually lower and bassier, and is usually used for playing rhythm.  The one in the middle is…well, in the middle.

The cool part is that the “in between” positions, 2 and 4 respectively, the signals from the fingerboard or bridge pickups are out of phase with the middle pickup.  It gives you a funky, reedy tone that is hard to describe, but impossible to miss (think “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits, or “Smoking Gun” by Robert Cray, or “The Core” by Eric Clapton).

The Strat has been the instrument of choice for an army of guitarists, all over the spectrum; from bluesmen like Eric Clapton (who has been pretty exclusively identified with Strats for the past forty years) and Robert Cray, through rockers like Jimi Hendrix, to peripatatic fretboard stylists like Mark Knopfer and Richard Thompson, to jazz and big band players, the Strat has been there and done that.

And it almost didn’t turn out that way.   The Strat’s first couple of years of sales were disappointing; Leo Fender fielded criticisms of the Strat’s bright, sharp sound, causing him to design a followup,  the “Jazzmaster”:

A Jazzmaster – most easily identified with Elvis Costello, J Mascis, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Mick Jagger (during his brief, late-seventies flirtation with playing guitar) and…yours truly, whose primary axe has been a Jazz for, um, 36 years. Mine is heavily modified, by the way – I have a third, Gibson “Soap Bar” pickup between the two stock pickups, wired out of phase, like a Strat – which actually gives a version of the Strat’s signature sound. It’s complicated – but sounds pretty awesome. But I digress.

The “Jazz” was designed to address the Strat’s “shortcomings”; the pickups were wired for a thicker, warmer sound, with more muted trebles and fuller bass and midranges. It was a more conservative design, both aesthetically and electrically.

But in the interim, rock and roll happened.  And the Strat – a relative bargain at the time – became, sharp tone and all, the preferred instrument of a generation of rock and rollers.

So successful was the Strat, of course, that the Gibson company – which had been producing the iconic, heavier, more-expensive “Les Paul”, reacted by producing a “Les Paul Junior”, with a lighter double-cutaway body; it’s better known today as the “SG”:

SG, Les Paul and Strat. I’ll take one of each, thanks.

And, notwithstanding a brief flash of Beatles-driven popularity for Rickenbacker guitars (brought back by Tom Petty in the late seventies), that’s been pretty much bedrock of the rock and roll guitarist’s arsenal ever since.

I’ve never owned a Strat – yet.  Someday.

I’ve known a few news reporters over the years.  They are, for the most part, human like the rest of us; they’re prone to the same sins as all of us.

Now, the news media as a whole has been coasting on a decades-old laurel – the whole “watchdogs of government” thing – that they have largely done a terrible job of earning for the past thirty years (unless Republicans are in office), and a nonexistent one this past six years.

But while the job they do has gone begging, the hubris that they developed over a number of muckraking decades before has not.

A few years back, a newspaper in the New York City metro area put its investigative brawn to use to publish…the names and addresses of legal New York carry permit holders; becasue the public has a right to know about law-abiding people doing legal, unremarkable things.  They were then shocked and horrified when bloggers returned the favor, publishing the editorial staff’s home addresses –  because apparently that provided a “chilling effect”, and the public doesn’t have a right to know that.

And here we are again; the NYTimes reporter who published Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s home address has found her own petard hoisted; bloggers posted her address in Chicago.

And she was reportedly not happy about it: 

In retribution, bloggers found and posted Bosman’s address online, sending the reporter scrambling hysterically for protection from the very people she had sold out — the police.

And apparently, she did so in a none-too-subtle fashion.

“She came in thinking she was Steven Spielberg or something shooting a movie,” a source within the Chicago Police Department was quoted as saying (H/T Western Journalism).

The source confirmed that not only did she grossly exaggerate the threats she had received, but she demanded “top-tier” protection of the sort usually accorded to movie stars and visiting dignitaries.

Because there are crazy people out there, you know.

Police brutality and unaccountability is certainly a story that needs to be covered – although, like most stories that matter, it’s one that the media have left pretty much undisturbed until recently, and one that won’t really be covered at all until a reporter at a major newspaper winds up on the wrong end of a tazer.

As we get ready for tomorrow’s beginning of the 2015 Legislative session, Senator Dave Hann gave the state a pretty fair look at conservative GOP priorities in an open letter to Governor Flint-Smith…er, Dayton in the PiPress over the weekend.

The whole thing is worth a read.  I’m going to pullquote the bit on education, which sounds like a little Scott Walker might just at long last be leaking across the border, thank God:>

Republicans will also be ready to consider bolder ideas and reforms such as breaking up our large urban school districts into smaller and more nimble organizations, able to better focus on solving our persistent achievement gap. Empowering parents and local school boards through public-employee-union rules reform and expanded school choice options are tools other states are using effectively. Every year there is talk about closing the achievement gap. But the policy of the DFL is always the same: increase spending. Every year we get the same results: flat or declining achievement. It borders on criminal to tell half the parents in Minneapolis we’ve improved education by providing more expensive schools from which their children will not graduate.

The whole letter is music to my ears – provided the GOP delivers on it (and prevails over the DFL majorities in the Senate and Governor Flint-Smith’s…er, Dayton’s partisan obstruction.

Hann was silent about the elephant in the room (for conservatives, at least), and perhaps justifiably so, from his perspective; the need for the GOP majority in the House to hold, or at least work hard to try to hold, the line on spending – especially the mindless pork-mongering that marred the GOP’s generally decent performance in the majority in the 2011 and 2012 sessions.

Wanna fire up the base?  Get the House caucus to chug a down some of whatever Scott Walker has for breakfast, sack up, and tell Governor Flint-Smith…er, Dayton where to put those proposed spending increases; show the “targeted tax breaks” (aka, swag to DFL constituencies) off to a place where the sun rarely shines.

Be, in short, what you were elected to be.  You were sent to office over the peoples’ revulsion over tax hikes, spending orgies, losing our doctors and our clinics and spending days signing up for MNSure, union money-grubbing from childcare and home care providers, and building useless trains while our roads flake away into impassability.

Remember that. Seriously.

Now, for years, I called myself “Minnesota’s Best Feminist” – largely because it pissed lesser feminists off so much.

I’ve laid off the bit for a few years, now – not because it wasn’t true (like most fathers these days, I don’t want my daughter to be held back for any reason but her own merit or hard work, or lack thereof (and she has plenty of both).  I am what some academics would call a “Gender-Equity Feminist” – someone who believes in removing obstacles to female equality in law, which is the starting point of real equality in our society.  That’s as opposed to “Gender Identity Feminists”, who see feminism as something analogous to nationalism, an identity to be upheld against a hostile opposition.  I’m not one of those.

Most of American “feminism” in academia and “womens’ studies” programs and the media today is the latter – which is a sort of dumb irony; members of the most spoiled, cossetted community in America, academics and social thinkers, from most most spoiled and overweened generation of people in American history (Generation X and the Millennials, who are rapidly approaching the Baby Boom for sheer irritation factor), prattling about the hardships they face.

The WaPo recently ran a list of new years resolutions by a group of “feminists”.

Most of them are written in the curious, circular argot of the post-1990s humanities graduate student, clogged with circular, post-structural, deconstructionist language that is only intermittently interchangeable with standard English.

By the way, the drawings of the various thinkers involved were done by the author of the WaPo piece, Ruth Tam.

So as my service to you, I’m going to translate the statements into plain(ish) English.

	Janet Mock, 31 | ‘Redefining Realness’ author and MSNBC’s ‘So Popular’ host | @JanetMock	“All you white, urban, upper-middle-class women have seized “feminism”. I’m here to subdivide the turf! Stand back!”
	Lux Alptraum, 32 | BinderCon co-founder | @luxalptraum	“When I talk about “putting programs and policies in place to level the playing field”, you know what I mean is yet another social-service bureaucracy staffed with lots of people like me – because those Women’s Studies degrees aren’t exactly raking in the bucks, if you catch my drift”.
	Leigh Stein, 30 | BinderCon co-founder | @rhymeswithbee	“While everyone that has any sort of public profile online gets harassed one way or another, I want to make harassing women a special, extra level of wrong. Sort of like ‘hate crime'”
	Ai-jen Poo, 40 | National Domestic Workers Alliance director, Caring Across Generations co-director, created #dwdignity, #caringamerica, #womentogether | @aijenpoo	“Hey, don’t let Lux Alptraum reel in all the swag! The political process…er, ‘feminism’, needs to provide jobs for my constituency, too!”
	Elizabeth Nyamayaro, 40 | Senior Advisor to Executive Director of UN Women, heads HeForShe campaign | @e_nyamayaro	“It sure sounds like I’m asking for men to just siddown and shaddup, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that…”
	Jessica Pierce, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Co-Chair | @JFierce	“Not only should one never waste a crisis, one must find a way to turn a crisis into power”
	Charlene Carruthers, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Coordinator | @CharleneCac	[Actually, Ms. Carruthers wasn’t especially satire-worthy; while I likely disagree, she says nothing especially outrageous]
	Lindy West, 32 | Writer, performer, I Believe You | It’s Not Your Fault founder and editor | @thelindywest	“Free Speech, Schmee Schmeech. Women, while boundlessly strong, are fragile vessels that must be protected from the scrum of the marketplace of ideas, above and beyond current civil and criminal law. That’s right – you must both respect womens’ power and yet show us a level of deference that’d make the Victorians shake their heads with disgust. Also, why did Ruth Tam dislocate my mouth?”
	Mikki Kendall, 38 | HoodFeminism.com co-editor, created #solidarityisforwhitewomen, #fasttailedgirls, #NotJustHello | @karnythia	“Poor black men are the disproportionate victims of police brutality. That’s a lot of victimological mindshare we feminists are leaving on the table. Let’s get moving on that!”
	Feminista Jones, 35 | Social Worker, writer, activist, created #YouOKSis and #NMOS14 | @FeministaJones	“More marches now!”
	Mia McKenzie, 38 | Award-Winning Writer, Black Girl Dangerous founder | @blackgirldanger	“You know when I say ‘I want to see queer and trans people of color with radical social and political analyses dominate independent media by creating and growing our own platforms, so we can centralize and control our own narratives’ that I actually mean ‘I want to develop yet another left-wing noise machine that allows ‘us’ to lie with impunity, just like the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and Media Matters do’, right?”
	Alexandra Brodsky, 24 | Know Your IX founding co-director; Feministing.com editor; The Feminist Utopia Project co-editor, Yale Law School student | @azbrodsky	“Dealing with sexual violence via concepts of ‘male guilt until proven innocence’, ‘trial without representation’ and ‘mob justice’ have done so much for higher education; it’s time to bring them from the campus to the larger society!”
	Patrisse Cullors, 31 | Dignity and Power Now executive director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @osope	“I have something to say – but first, I’m gonna cut Ruth Tam for this drawing she did of me”
	Alicia Garza, 33 | National Domestic Workers Alliance Special Projects Director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @aliciagarza, @blklivesmatter	“When I say stuff like ‘black women are the portals to the future’, I’m not being racist. Seriously.”
	Opal Tometi, 30 | Black Alliance for Just Immigration Executive Director, Co-Founder www.blacklivesmatter.com, co-created #BlackLivesMatter, #reunitehaitianfams, blackimmigration.net, reunitehaitianfamilies.com | @opalayo	“When I went to the doctor, I told her ‘forget about the virus – treat the sneezing!'”
	Brianna Spacekat Wu, 35 | Giant Spacekat head of development | @spacekatgal	“Just as Americans did at Omaha Beach and Selma, we need to mobilize our entire society against the plague of doughy, cheetoh-dust-flecked thirty-something game programmers sending hate male to female game programmers; that is the real plague!”

You hear that sound, gender-equity feminism? That’s a boat revving up, pulling a full load of Fonzie behind it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re a recent Powerline article:

“Mandatory” [spending] does not include defense, it covers things the government must spend because people are entitled to them: i.e., welfare, medicare, social security, etc.

 

Entitlements are the big growth. Not a surprise. For my wife and me, it’s $22,000 worth. That’s an eye opener.

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how conservatives can warn people about something for six years, and it can still be a surprise, even to smart people, how bad it actually is.

It matters not so much exactly who the GOP elects as Speaker of the House, with two special criteria:

• It’s not John Boehner,
• It’s an actual conservative

Is Louis Gohmert the guy?  Hell, I’d go for just about anyone:

“With a growing Republican majority in the House and a historically high number of liberty-voting fiscal conservatives within it, there is an urgent need replace Speaker Boehner with fresh, bold leadership that better represents the views of the whole caucus,” FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said in a statement on Sunday.

 

“Speaker Boehner has kicked fiscal conservatives off committee positions for voting against his wishes, caved on numerous massive spending bills at the eleventh hour, and abused the legislative process to stomp out opposition by holding surprise votes and giving members little time to actually read the bills before they vote,” Kibbe added.

 

The conservative group will urge activists to contact their representatives ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

I’d love to see a Trey Gowdy.   I’d go for just about anyone over Boehner.

Take note, Minnesota Republican delegation to DC:  make it conservative, or give up on the 2016 election right now.

And take that lesson – moderate hamsters do not pack the gear – forward with you to the Presidential race.

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:

• Senator Dave Osmek and Representative-Elect Jim Nash join me to talk about the upcoming session in the Senate.

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:

• 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!

H2O –  two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen – makes water.  You drink a lot of it daily.

H2O2 is Hydrogen Peroxide.  It just adds an extra oxygen atom – but if you drink it, you’ll get sick; it’s toxic.

They lookalmost the same – but they are very different, just with the addition of that one little Oxygen atom.

Little changes mean a lot.

Like Crack Whores With A Stolen Credit Card: Minnesota has a “billion dollar surplus” – meaning that the state is on track to take in about a billion dollars more than even the DFL planned to take in after jacking taxes up by two billion dollars in the last two sessions.

Now, back in the nineties, we had surplus after surplus after surplus.  And the largely DFL-controlled legislature, aided and abetted by Governor Arne Carlson (who was an old-school “moderate” Republican, who’d probably be a “moderate” DFLer today, if any such thing existed), turned every single one of them into permanent spending – which is a little like finding a $50 bill on the street, and adding $50 to your monthly entertainment budget as a result.

But it’s a new year, and another decade.

Notwithstanding the fact that the GOP wave largely skipped Minnesota (except for the House races in Greater Minnesota), the aftereffects are still being felt in Saint Paul.  There’s less of the triumphalistic talk about equalizing society through taxation that the DFL gave us in the last two sessions.

It’s Such An Innocent Little Word: But make no mistake; the DFL wants to turn the surplus into spending.

They’ll call it “targeted tax relief”.

The phrase is a clever one; it includes the phrase “tax relief”, so the average Minnesotan will see “tax relief”,and assume that their taxes are going to be, y’know, relieved.

But “targeted” is to “tax relief” as “extra Oxygen atom” is to “water”:  it turns it from an unalloyed good into a cudgel of DFL social engineering.

Governor Flint-Smith Dayton has her his fingerprints on some of it:

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton’s already made it clear that child care tax credits are on his list.

Currently, about 38,000 families receive the credit. Dayton said he wants to lift the income eligibility to include 137,000 more families. He said the cost would be $175 million over two years.

“The state program is capped very low and phases out very quickly,” Dayton said. “It really doesn’t reach working middle-income, one- and two-parent families. Talk about tax reduction that benefits the middle class — that to me is probably one of the most significant things we can do.”

And isn’t that just like the state of Minnesota – spend two years trying to force daycare providers into AFSCME, and then making taxpayers pay for it again?

Just Hand It Over: In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk has different ideas:

Bakk said tax reductions will compete with other spending proposals during the budget-writing session, and he said the final product won’t satisfy everyone. He said he favors tax relief targeted to economic development in struggling areas of the state.

And by “struggling areas of the state”, he means the Iron Range, which after 50 years of being put out of business by DFL policy still votes DFL, and wants the rest of the state to pay for it.

Anyway – “targeted tax cuts” are to “tax cuts” as “H202” is to “H20”; they are another term for “payoff for DFL constituencies”.

As I mentally get ready to start a new job that is well within biking range, I can’t help but read about U2’s Bono, and his biking accident in New York.

Bono broke his arm in six places and fractured his eye socket, hand and shoulder blade in what he called a “freak accident” in New York.

Ow.  Ow.  Ow.  Ow.

At the time, the hospital where Bono was being treated said he had been involved in “a high-energy bicycle accident when he attempted to avoid another rider”…The 54-year-old Dubliner revealed he now had a titanium elbow.

Ouch.  Ow.  Owwwww.

Irish singer-songwriter Bono and his band U2 pictured in Berlin late last year

Bono said he “blanked out on impact and have no memory of how I ended up in New York Presbyterian with my humerus bone sticking through my leather jacket. Very punk rock as injuries go”.

Aaaagh.  Owww. Ow.  Owwwwwwww.

Bono continued: “Recovery has been more difficult than I thought. As I write this, it is not clear that I will ever play guitar again. The band have reminded me that neither they nor western civilization are depending on this.

“I personally would very much miss fingering the frets of my green Irish falcon or my (red) Gretsch. Just for the pleasure, aside from writing tunes.

“But then does the Edge, or Jimmy Page, or any guitarist you know have a titanium elbow, as I do now? I’m all elbows, I am.”

Aaaaaaaaaaagh.

I’d mention that Nils Lofgren has two replacement knees, except aaaaaaaaaaaagh.

He talked about learning from his mistakes adding “the first of which is the discovery that I am not an armoured vehicle”.

I love biking.  And biking in the city is certainly all about having 360° situational awareness.

But, in addition, aaaaaaagh ow ow ow.

Just under four weeks from today – January 28 – 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!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to urge us to “pretend”:

Pretend for a minute that President Obama doesn’t believe the United States ought to be a superpower, that it ought to be equal with other nations (not a big stretch – that belief motivated the Atom Spies to give nuclear secrets to the Russians and no doubt is shared by billions of people worldwide, today). How would he go about bringing America down to second or even third-world levels following the model of, say, Argentina?

• Alienate traditional allies. Check.
• Weaken military power, numbers and morale. Check.
• Nationalize major industry. Check.
• Weaken domestic energy independence, increase foreign dependence. Check.
• Widen wealth gap. Check.
• Reduce earners, increase idlers. Check.
• Use government employees to intimidate political opponents. Check.
• Crush middle class with regulations and taxes. In progress.
• Debase the currency by printing money. In progress.
• Debase the citizenry by flinging open borders. In progress.

So what’s next on the agenda? What will it take to bring the USA down to the economic, military, social and political level of, say, Spain?

Joe Doakes

About the only thing he hasn’t done is enlist Visigoths and Vandals into the military as auxiliaries.

Surly opens its new brew pub near Dinkytown today…

…as the craft beer world finally starts to ask “do we need to apply hops to beer the way William Westmoreland applied napalm and Agent Orange to the Viet Cong?”

We wait a full year for the Shooties – my annual award ceremony for all that is awful about Twin Cities blogging and alternative media.

And yet it’s always so very, totally worth it.

So let’s start making the sausage, shall we?

The Sominex Award:  This year, this award goes to the leftyblog that bored me completely stiff.

And this year, the award goes to:  The Entire Twin Cities Leftyblogosphere!

Look – Twin Cities leftyblogs are almost always dumb.  Most of the smart ones – and there have been a few – have moved on to greener pastures.  And what’s left?

When Sally Jo Sorenson is the cream of the remaining crop, you know you’ve got a problem.

The “Oceania Has Always Thought Eastasia Acted Perfectly Normal” Award:  For the fifth straight year, the Twin Cities media – the so-called “fifth estate” that ostensibly keeps an eye on government – asked not a single question about the physical or mental health of a governor who disappeared for weeks, and seemed to barely be in the office when he was in the office.

The “Fonzie Is Up On His Skis” Award:  The entire political “fact-check” genre jumped the proverbial shark long ago, lost in a welter of bald-faced left-wing biased capstoned by “Polifact”, the putative flagship of the genre, flagging a “Lie of the Year” that turned out to be as true as mom’s apple pie in 2012.

But MPR’s “Poligraph” feature broke new, er, ground this past year – “fact-checking” one of Jeff Johnson’s purely-subjective statements about the governor’s race.

The “That Bludgeoned Feeling You Get” Award:  There was a national wave for Republicans – one of the biggest in history.  It was a wave that largely vindicated the Tea Party – the fiscally-conservative, socially-libertarian asymmetric grass roots movement that rocked official Washington in both parties back on its heels in 2010, and got pushed back after a massive nationwide campaign of demonization in the mainstream and left alt-medias (pardon the redundancy).

And the wave conquered the Minnesota House – at least in Greater Minnesota.  The DFL Machine held most of the Twin Cities metro, but for a stubborn seat in Burnsville that finally fell to Roz Peterson.

And yet the Minnesota GOP didn’t get even one solitary statewide office.  Not even the Secretary of State, which polls in the weeks before the election showed as a likely pickup for the MNGOP’s Dan Severson.

Let’s reiterate this:  in the midst of a nationwide wave of revulsion for the Obama Administration, where Republicans took the governors offices in Maryland and Illinois, to say nothing of decisively taking hold of the US Senate, the MNGOP laid an egg statewide.

It’s enough to try the patience of even a Saint Paul republican.

The “Nothing Here But Us Davids!” Award:  This one goes to the entire Minnesota Second Amendment movement.

After being humiliated by the shooters in the 2013 session, the gun-grabbers came back with hundreds of thousands of dollars of Michael Bloomberg’s money, hiring a platoon of top-flight lobbyists to supplant the hapless Heather Martens and the demented Jane Kay at the Capitol.

And even though the entire Legislature was controlled by the DFL, with a DFL governor, the antis got absolutely nothing.  Michael Bloomberg’s money was as wasted as John Bonham, Keith Moon and Ronnie Van Zant in a Motel Six in Houston with an unlimited bar tab.

The Back To The Future Award:  The Star/Tribune, in an effort to buff up its online presence, added some new blogs.

And when I say “new”, I mean “pretty much exactly the ones that anyone who is deeply cynical about the Strib’s relentless editorial left-wing slang would expect them to hire”.

You’ve got Mark Andrew, former state DFL chair Minneapolis mayor candidate and self-appointed giver of scarlet letters.  You’ve got Molly Priesmeyer, a woman whom the Twin Cities leftymedia takes inexplicably seriously (even though we surely do not).  There’s the perfectly capable Aaron Brown – one of a very short list of Minnesota liberal bloggers who don’t deserve to be under police surveillance.  And there’s my old friend and former NARN colleague Michael Brodkorb.  Michael’s a good writer and great reporter, but let’s be honest; before he started straying from the GOP line, the Strib wouldn’t have collectively urinated on him if he had been  on fire.  Now that he’s a little more, I think it’s fair to say, unattached?  Suddenly the Strib bites.

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you.

The Benito Mussolini Award:  In 2014, the Met Council opened its second light rail line, drilled straight down the middle of University Avenue, at a cost of $1.4 Billion.  As has been noted in this space in the past, it was the wrong kind of train in the wrong place (“light rail” is supposed to jet along at 55MPH along routes with stops roughly every mile, like the “Blue Line” does; if you’re going to go down the middle of a busy urban street, you should build a trolley).

So last June, the Green Line, connecting the downtowns, opened with suffocating fanfare and cloying adulation…

…and, as it happens, not much speed.   It took over an hour to go from downtown to downtown – about the same as the limited-stop 50 Bus that the train replaced (which did the route in about an hour), not much  faster than the local 16 bus (about 90 minutes), and much, much slower than the 94 Express, which did the route with very limited stops in about 25 minutes.  (The Met Council responded by eliminating the 94 Express outside rush hour).

So bad was it that even the transit fans at MPR, who had been cheerleading the Green Line since its inception (except for the part where it went past the MPR studios), were unamused to the point of taking the car.

I rode the Green Line once and once only – on its debut night.  I rode from Hamline down to the Union Depot; it took about an hour and fifteen minutes, counting walking down to University and waiting for the train.  That compared to about 40 minutes if I took the 67 bus (25 minutes) and walked from Cedar down to Union Depot, or 30 minutes if I biked it, or maybe fifteen by car, counting finding a parking spot.

I calculated that if they get the “Southwest Light Rail” built, it’ll mean someone can go from Union Depot to Eden Prairie Center in three hours.

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

Townsend’s statements sum up the arrogance of the professional bureaucrat, the institutional utopian, the Masters of the Universe who believe they were sent here to keep us peasants from crapping in our beds.

And the winner this year?  The entire Democrat “Farmer” Labor Party, as well as the entire machine that supports it in this state – Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota,  Take Action Minnesota, the Star-Tribune and other left-leaning non-profits – who, after two years of blatantly carrying the DFL’s water on their signature pledge in the 2012 election (“We’ll lower property taxes for the middle class!”), promptly…

…presided over massive increases in property taxes for the middle class.

Which somehow got less media coverage than Teddy Bridgewater’s choice of sneakers.

OK, that’ll do it for this year!  See you in 2015!

In 1981, Ronald Reagan had to deal with a fairly sharp, intense recession, with some fairly intense “negative growth”:

1981 Q04: -4.5895

1982 Q01: -6.5220

1982 Q02: 2.1923

1982 Q03: -1.4300

For those of you who weren’t around back then?  It was a nasty little downturn, especially coming on the heels of the sluggish, stagflation-addled seventies.

1982 Q04:  0.3890

1983 Q01:  5.3465

1983 Q02:  9.4443

1983 Q03:  8.0625

1983 Q04:  8.5095

1984 Q01:  8.1868

1984 Q02:  7.2118

Long before he started stretching the Constitution out of shape, Obama broke one other, less formal rule – really more of a truism:  as a very broad rule, sharp recessions, left on their own, tend to have sharp recoveries.  Reagan’s recession was a sharp, intense one, accompanied by the worst unemployment since the Great Depression (only tied in late 2009 by Obama’s recession).

And Reagan got out of the way, and let the market heal the economy (except of course the defense sector – but then, that’s never part of the “free market”) heal itself.

And it came roaring back much bigger and better than ever.

Obama, of course, took office in the midst of another sharp, intense downturn.

And six years later, he’s doing the end-zone happy dance as he claims a 5% growth in GDP.

Now, let’s presume for a moment that that 5% “growth rate” is organic (although it most assuredly is not).

It’s six years into a sharp recession.   Left to its own devices – without “Quantitative Easing”, without “Too Big To Fail” and skyrocketing energy prices, without Obamacare – we should have been seeing much better growth than this…

…in 2010 or 2011.

But during the Obama Recession, like the Great Depression, the economy was left to pretty much the opposite of “its own devices”.

 Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Since it’s all fake government stimulus money anyway, what does it matter when we count it? We count it when it helps Democrats most, duh.

Joe Doakes

Of course, the “increase in personal consumption” that drove the supposed growth was almost entirely…

…spending on Obamacare!