The shootings in Ferguson earlier this week were an ugly, new-ish wrinkle in the situation.

Among all the sturm und drang from the left about America’s gun laws and the sheer number of guns available in the US, the use of guns in demonstrations, even riots, is relatively rare.  It happens, of course; my old colleague John MacDougall reported carrying a gun with him when he covered the riots in North Minneapolis in 1968; some rioters shot at police during the LA riots.

But for the number of guns available in the US, very few of them over come out during periods of unrest.

Now,  I’m sure the shooters in the audience took note of this part of the story:

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said one officer was shot in the face, just below his right eye, with the bullet lodging behind his ear. The other officer was hit in the shoulder, and the bullet came out his back…Authorities believe the shots came from a handgun fired about 120 yards away. There were no suspects in custody.

120 yards?  With a handgun?

Either there’s a rogue SAS trooper or Olympic marksman in Ferguson,  or the “luckiest”, fluke-iest crook in the US, or two of the unluckiest cops – or someone was firing a pistol-caliber scoped carbine.

Where “endless one-sided talk about principles” is checkers, “taking those principles to a legislature that’s at least partly full of people that disagree with you, and trying to turn those principles into policy” is chess.

And one of the big reasons I left the Libertarian Party, and criticize the “Liberty movement” so often these days, is not so much that so many of them play checkers (that’s true of most people in any party), but that so m any of their loudest voices have convinced themselves that playing chess instead of endless rounds of checkers is a moral offense and a distraction that diverts one from the purity of checkers.

The FCC’s new internet rules cite a Soros-funded front group dozens and dozens of times:

New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist…The term “Free Press” is mentioned 62 times in the regulations. Some are redundant mentions referring to the same Free Press activists’ comments in favor of more oversight. In total, the FCC cited Free Press’ pro-net neutrality arguments 46 times.

The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

The Obama Administraiton is the most transparently corrupt administration in history.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Roughed out my taxes. Going to have to write a check to the IRS – not enough deductions.

I suppose I could
start a private charity to solicit giant donations – the blue arrowhead is helpful, find your friends! Or maybe just not pay the taxes.

But I’m not a Democrat. I need a side business where I can lose some money on paper and write off expenses such as bar association dues.

Any suggestions?

Joe Doakes

I got nothing for you, man.

Anyone?

It’s corollary time:

The Boehner Inversion the Reagan Corollary to Berg’s Eleventh Law:   Similarly, the Republican that Democrats support, is supported purely to wedge the conservative wing of the party

Berg’s Laws:  there’s a reason they’re not called “Berg’s Casual Observations”.

Opponents of urban charter schools – inevitably white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, Subaru-driving people with degrees from Macalester – have developed a habit of sniffing that urban charters are “a return to segregation”, because many charters, especially in the city, are aimed at ethnic groups.

What these lilywhite guardians of “diversity”-for-its-own-sake miss is that these charters – the Twin Cities have schools aimed at black, H’mong, latino and Native American kids, and used to have one serving Muslim students – may be “segregated”, but it’s entirely voluntary; the decision of the parents and families involved.

And why would they do that?

Because they’re racists?

Perhaps.  More likely, I suspect, it’s cultural (the Native American and H’mong schools), and linguistic (the Latino schools).

And I suspect that for more than a few parents, it’s more like this:  while they like the idea of “diversity” – exposing their children to different people, cultures, races and the like – they also know they’ve got one shot with their kids.  America’s racial problems aren’t going to be fixed in 12 years.  If they’re fixed in thirteen years, that’s great – but too late for your first-grader.

And in the meantime, lurking in the background at the worst “diverse” schools, are scenes like this (and save your breath, Volvo-driving ninnies; this sort of tension is endemic at urban schools; my kids went there for years, and while it rarely got that bad, it hovered over the school experience in ways ugly and comical for their entire time in school).  And while I suspect that, like me, a lot of parents would love for their kids to participate in America’s ethnic “conversation”, they also figure that there’s plenty of time for that when they’re adults, and they’d like to spend that first 12 years focusing on them getting an education without all the pointless, mindless tension.

This form email has been making the rounds at the capitol in Saint Paul.  The person who sent it to me is under the impression that it shows the gun-grabbers are running out of good ideas and smart people.

Au contraire, said I.  This letter is a miracle, bordering on the first radio signal and the first nuclear fissile pile.

Because so much stupid is jammed into this email, it violates what were once thought to be inviolate laws of physics.

The woman – she’s a suburban matron from Mound – comes out swinging:

I oppose legalizing silencers in Minnesota (HF 1434). Silencers are designed to let people commit murder and get away with it.

Only in the movies.

They do the same thing for guns that mufflers do for cars; forestall hearing loss.  They take 30 decibels off the “bang” of a gun firing. What does this mean?

This:  “…for most commercially available fire arms and cartridges, this ends up only reducing the noise level to somewhere in the range of 130-150-ish dB for a supersonic cartridge and 117-130-ish dB for a subsonic cartridge. For reference on just how loud that is, an ambulance or police siren is typically between 100-140 dB. So this isn’t exactly the “whoosh” sound Hollywood depicts.”

Someone’s been watching too many movies:

In addition, silencers would compromise Minneapolis’ crime-fighting “shot-spotter” technology.

About as much as things like buildings and cars and anything else that gets between a shot and a shot-spotter microphone.  In other words, not really.

I also oppose HF 305, a bill to let North Dakota legislators decide who can carry guns in Minnesota. Under current law, state law enforcement reviews other states’ laws to determine if the other states’ permits should be recognized in MInnesota. That is as it should be. We should not let North Dakota legislators decide what is best for public safety in Minnesota.

This is mad ignorance.

The law allows the Commissioner of Public Safety decides whether other states’ carry permitting laws are “subsantially similar” to Minnesota’s.  North Dakota implemented a two-tier system – one permit for residents, and another for non-residents, specifically to cater to that absurd restriction in Minnesota law, to help avoid creating a felony trap for law-abiding citizens from both states.  Knowing, as I do, er, “friends” who have to stop in Moorhead or East Grand Forks when travelling west to move, er, payloads to the trunk, this change is long overdue.  Not that author of this post knows the difference.

Two other bills, HF 830 and HF 372, are unnecessary. In particular, weakening our laws around carrying guns at the Capitol is a step in the wrong direction.

But she doesn’t favor us with a reason why.

That’s simple; she’s parroting something someone else told her.  There is no downside to the proposal; Capitol Security has real-time access to the database of carry permittees; the current notification statute is a throwback to the days when permits weren’t computerized.

Please join me in opposing these bills.

[“Writer’s” name redacted]
Mound, MN 5536

She must be on the “Minnesota Progressive Project” farm club.

50 years ago, United States declared a “War on Poverty”.

For much of the last 30 years, the State of Minnesota has been actively pursuing a top-down housing policy, aggressively trying to jiggle the “mix” of housing found in communities that grew up organically over the course of a century and a half.

And for almost 20 years, the cities have been extremely aggressively squeezing out private market “low income housing”, while “investing” heavily in public low income housing.

In schools in the Twin Cities crummier neighborhoods have been terrible for nobody knows how long.

What do all of these things have in common, besides being functions of the cultural left?

The attempt to use politics to solve social problems.

So it’s perhaps ironic that Myron Orfield, the patron Saint of the dismal, discredited political “art” of “urban planning”, comes perilously close to blaming the right thing – politics – for once in one of his studies.

He’s it cited in the MinnPost::

Specifically, Orfield and his co-authors from the institute — Will Stancil, Thomas Luce and Eric Myott — blame policies and practices that redirected affordable housing programs from mostly white suburbs back to segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul and first-tier suburbs such as Brooklyn Center and Richfield.

“You can build affordable housing in poor neighborhoods,” he said during an interview this week, “you just shouldn’t build all of it [there].”

Absolutely not. Why, you “should” build low income housing in West Bloomington, and Southwest Edina, and North Oaks, and Kenwood!

Except since the policy is entirely driven by politics, the people with political clout decide how the policy will be implemented. And the people in those DFL-addled areas have decided that poverty is just too hard on their property values.

In the meantime – driven by the same sorts of policies that the likes of Orfield have been peddling to cities for close to a generation – Minneapolis and St. Paul have been making it virtually impossible to be a successful private market landlord in either city. Meaning “affordable housing” is almost exclusively provided by the government – at two or three times its market value.

The DFL takes the likes of Myron Orfield very seriously (except, of course, for putting “affordable housing” next door to their leadership’s homes). The next paragraph explains why I don’t:

The study also repeats an argument Orfield has put forward before: that charter schools re-create school segregation by creating institutions that are too often mostly black or, increasingly, mostly white. “I don’t think the public schools in segregated neighborhoods have been doing very well for a long time,” he said in an interview this week. “I think they’re bad schools. I don’t defend them at all. But the sad thing is, the charters are worse.”

The difference – and it takes someone as highly educated as Myron Orfield to miss it – is this: charter schools are voluntary. They are a free market (well, free-market-ish) response to the rot and decay in our school systems. Unlike the wretched inner-city public schools, nobody forces anybody to go to them. They succeed or fail on their own merits – unlike, again, public schools.

Perhaps poor parents know something that highly educated experts like Orfield don’t; that forcing kids to be proxies for their adults “discussion on race” may make academics like Orfield feel good, but it does nothing for their children’s futures.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We can’t disarm Iran.  We need them to help Iraq take Tikrit away from ISISwhile we watch.Yes, Tikrit.  Saddam Hussein’s birthplace.  The town we conquered in 2003 and killed all the terrorists, then handed over to the Iraqi government after Saddam was dead.

We took it, we had it, we cleaned it terrorist-free.  Obama pulled out the troops in 2011 and the terrorists took it back.

At least Johnson had a rationale for taking the hill to show the Vietnamese we could smash them, then giving it back to show we could be reasoned with.  What’s Obama’s strategery?

Joe Doakes

On the one hand, using proxies to do your dirty work was always how smart emperors handled their foreign policies.

On the other hand, Obama is not smart.

First, credit where it’s due; Jeff Kolb is a guy who walked the walk; in a city full of political activists with big ideas, he settled for big accomplishments, running for and winning a seat on the city council in last fall’s GOP sweep in Crystal. Now, it’d be inaccurate to call Kolb a conservative ideologue; he’s a Republican.

And he wants you to be absolutely clear about one more thing:

Let’s get this out of the way right away. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of a Tea Party. I’ve never been to a Tea Party meeting. I don’t even drink tea. I know many people who have been involved with the Tea Party in one way or another, and many of them are fine people who care about their country, but choose to show it in a different way than I do.

And let’s be clear; I am a Tea Partier.  I don’t think that there’s any rational doubt that the Tea Party brought the GOP back – to the extent that it is back – from its 2008 nadir, and brought the party a relevance among the limited-government conservatives that had largely deserted the party.

But Kolb’s focus is here in Minnesota – and he gets some things right…:

Here in Minnesota, two opportunists in particular have done a great job of establishing themselves as self-appointed “leaders” of the Tea Party movement, they being Jack Rogers and Jake Duesenberg of the Minnesota Tea Party Alliance. They have a sweet URL that makes them seem extra legit, teaparty.mn and they operate the MN Tea Party PAC.

…and a few things wrong…:

Jack and Jake haven’t been as successful as the guys from FreedomWorks, only raising $8,200 in 2014. They spent $8,900. The irony of the deficit spending is probably lost on them. A total of $0 was spent to support the election of any candidates.

…but then that’s true of most Tea Party groups; very few endorsed, much less spent money on, candidates at all.

And he gets a few things that are worth talking about: 

Credit where credit is due, Jack and Jake may not raise a lot of money, but they have perfected the art of over the top symbolic gestures as a way to generate media coverage.

We’ll come back to that.   

A quick search of the Star Tribune archives shows Jack has been mentioned in 12 recent stories, Jake, sadly, only 6. In most of these stories you can find Jack and Jake bad mouthing Republicans. About the only candidate they seemed to like in 2014 was Jeff Johnson. Take from that what you will.

I sure will; I liked and supported Jeff Johnson.  Kolb, if memory (and a quick Google search) serves, supported the Scott Honour for Governor juggernnaut, and has joined in with the avalanche of second-guessing that followed Johnson’s loss.

But I came here not to slag on Kolb.   

Jack and Jake’s most recent stunt was an over-the-top tantrum aimed at notorious RINO Tom Emmer. Emmer, you see, chose to attend an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma. Or as Jack put it: “a parade in Alabama.” You see, Jack and Jake would have preferred that Congressman Emmer instead attended a small gathering of local Republican activists, so those activists could yell at him about how he is a sell-out who hates the constitution or something because Emmer didn’t commit career suicide in his first vote in Congress by voting against John Boehner for Speaker of the House and/or didn’t think gambling with the safety of the nation was a good strategic move.

I saw Jack and Jake’s attack on Emmer for skipping the BPOU conventions to go to Selma, and thought it was extremely ill-advised; anyone who thinks freshman Congresscritters have a lot of freedom in their votes is either not paying attention, or is demigogueing like mad.

During the 2014 US Senate campaign Jack and Jake infamously told US Senate candidate Mike McFadden to “Go to Hell” during a meeting. I think it’s high time Republicans say the same thing to Jack and Jake. No serious candidate for office or elected official should attend any event sponsored by the MN Tea Party Alliance. The group seems to exist for the sole purpose of promoting Jack and Jake. It’s time other Republicans stop playing along.

Well, no.  That’d be a horrible idea.

Think Jack and Jake are hucksters?  What?  Hucksters in politics?  The hell you say.

But the worst mistake the GOP can make is to try to position itself as “above and better than” the Tea Party.  It’s bad PR, and its just not true.

Engage?  Call on BS?  By all means.

Boycott?

Bad idea.

The Clintons’ foundation, in addition to being tied to enough corruption to warrant comparisons between Hillary and Richard Nixon, is floating in influence-renting money from Middle Eastern nations that treat women like Marge Schott treated the domestic help, only with “death” instead of “venial little insults” involved.

But remember:  Koch!

Lorne Michaels is reputedly about to open a Chinese-cast version of Saturday Night Live in the world’s largest country.

Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since SNL’s been funny. 

And he won’t need to change the show’s political biases one bit.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration says banning ammunition protects the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s as if their speech-writer is a computerized buzz-word generator.  Doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t have to, won’t fool anybody and isn’t intended to.  It’s just soothing white noise.

Joe Doakes

I’ve been observing this for the past few years – mostly from Obama, but the Minnesota DFL as adopted it as well:

1. Say whatever rhetorically fits the narrative
2. Don’t worry about your voter base – low-information, gullible people, many of them with advanced degrees – prodding into it too deeply.
3. Worry even less about the media bothering you with it.

It’s brilliant, really, if sliding into petty dictatorship is what you’re after.

The temps are in the fifties. More important, the temperature at 7AM is above 33 degrees.

And after a couple of lean-ish years, it looks like biking season starts for me at 7AM tomorrow!

I wrote a lot about biking to work from 2007 through 2010. Back then, I had a job in downtown Saint Paul. It had a locker room and a couple of really fun, obvious routes which – this is important – were alongside or near bus routes. That way, if I had a mechanical problem on the road (always a possibility, when I was riding my early-eighties road bike as I was at the time), the worst case was I’d get to work on time.

It’s been a little tougher since then. In 2011, I worked at a very bike-friendly company – in Minnetonka. It was a 16 mile ride each way – easy enough if you’re in shape, difficult if you’re not. So I spent much of the summer building up to commuting. This involved finding “park and ride” lots at varying distances from the office, a little further each week. Which led to a big leap around mid-summer; from park-and-rides in Saint Louis Park, seven miles from the office, to having to ride all the way across Minneapolis (where there are no park and rides), and do the whole 16 miles.

Which, at long last, I did – once. I rode 16 miles to work in the morning. And then I rode home that night. And as I got to the top of the long, grueling climb up Marshall Avenue, two miles from home, I got a call – my son was in the ER, the beginning of a three month ordeal that had me at the hospital most evenings, living on Jimmy Johns and Cosetta’s Pizza (yum) and losing most of the gains I’d made over the summer.

The next season – 2012, or Season 6 – I worked at a company in West Bloomington. A 22 mile, non-bike-friendly commute to a building that had no locker room. Biking was out. The next two summers – 2013-14, or Seasons 7-8 – I worked at a job that was nominally bike-friendly – they had a locker room of sorts (a shower stall in one of the men’s rooms) and a theoretically manageable distance (11 miles). But it was one of the worst routes in the Twin Cities; from Saint Paul backstreets to the brutal (if you’re out of shape) climb up Pilot Knob. Worse, most of the route wasn’t along any kind of transit; a blowout would mean an hour of pushing a bike to a bus route or to the office. I made a half-hearted go of it in 2013, and didn’t bother last year.

And it shows this year. I’m not in the worst shape I’ve been in, but I can see if from here.

But I have an eminently bikeable job this year, in a great route for getting back into shape (with some easy upgrades when I get my wind and legs back), a locker room, a place to park a bike, and a spring that, so far, is turning out to be excellent; I don’t recall the snow being melted and the tempersatures above 33 at go-time at all in the past years.

So I’ll see you out on the trail!

Black unemployment is double white unemployment, national average, after six years of The Lightworker.

Maybe we’ll just pass a law requiring the rate to drop…

By the standards of the preceding weeks, the activity at Hanford on the night of March 10th, 1945 was relatively quiet.

The Hanford Site, sitting on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state, was the first large-scale plutonium production reactor in the world.  The facility had just produced the plutonium delivered for the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico a month earlier.  While that first batch of plutonium had taken Hanford over a month to produce, the site was now quickly shipping large quantities of plutonium every five days as the first atomic bombs were being assembled.  The work was top secret (few staff even knew what they were producing or why) and extremely dangerous.

Thus few could have anticipated the explosion outside the site that knocked out power to the reactor’s cooling pumps.  Without electricity running the cooling pumps, the reactor could have easily melted down.  Who could have known the military value of Hanford, yet alone where to strike at such a vulnerable part of the site?  The answer was even harder to believe – the explosion had been the result of a billion-to-one shot; a bomb from a Japanese Fu-go or “fire balloon.”

—

Fu-go yourself: the Japanese launched 9,300 “fire balloons”, or Fu-go’s, at North America in the later months of the war. Highly ineffective, they nevertheless caused considerable concern in Washington

From the moment Japanese bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial High Command had dreamed of striking the American homeland.  And while there were a handful of incidents throughout 1942 of Japanese submarines shelling the U.S. and Canadian coasts, these were, at best, singular attempts to cause panic.  A concentrated campaign against the American interior had not been given serious consideration.  An earlier proposal of putting the Japanese equivalent of a submarine “wolf-pack” together to strike Los Angeles on Christmas Eve in 1941 had been dismissed amid Japanese concerns about potential retaliation. (more…)

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking in Fort Snelling State Park, scouting his bike commuting routes.   

Avery LIBRELLE rides past on a recumbent bike; large orange flag flutters above, and bright strobe lights on front and rear repeatedly flash.  

LIBRELLE:  Haha, Merg!  You wingnuts are all hopped up over Benjamin Netanyahu and his speech.   But he’s lying.

BERG:  How do you figure?

LIBRELLE:  He predicted Iran would have the bomb by 1999.

BERG:  Right.  Maybe that’s the information he had.  And maybe he was trying to stir some action on a subject that is of great importance to Israel – the idea of a country that continuously publicly pines for Israel’s extinction and death to all Jews getting nuclear weapons.

LIBRELLE:  He lied, Merg!

BERG:  He said something that turned out not to be true.  If you can prove he intended to decieve, sure, then it was a lie.  If not, then it was an error.

LIBRELLE:  Either way he completely blew his credibility!

BERG:  So if a leader ever gets anything wrong, it destroys his credibility forever?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely!

BERG:  OK, glad we have that established.  So, do you remember this diagram?

President Obama’s prediction for unemployment rates if we just invested trillions of dollars in, as it eventually turned out, giving cash to big banks.  He was completely wrong.  So – does that destroy his credibility?

LIBRELLE:  You’re a racist and you hate women.

Now – can you give me a push up the hill?  I have to get to a candle-sniffing.

And SCENE. 

The Mozilla Firefox browser seems to be slipping into second-tier status, after nearly 2 decades as one of the go to web browsers.

Is it lagging technology?

Or is it user anger over the politically correct ouster of former CEO, Brandon Eich?

Personal experience in the IT business says the former is certainly a factor – but there’s evidence that the witchhunt is accelerating things.

I got a high, hanging change-up for you here.

Please see to it.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Benjamin Netanyahu urges Congress to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Barack Obama disagrees. Who’s right?

Ayatollah Khamenei, the highest religious leader in Iran, believes the Shia messiah will arrive as soon as Israel is destroyed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the highest political official in Iran, believes Islam is required to destroy Israel and then, the United States. They’ve said so for a decade, repeatedly, unwaveringly. And they continue to pursue nuclear technology, lying to the United Nations, cheating inspections and breaking promises.

The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area packs 3 million people into 500 square miles. That’s half the population of Israel living in an area the size of Hennepin County.

A one kiloton nuclear weapon can destroy about 80 square miles, not much damage in an area so large. That’s why America built MIRV warheads – Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles capable of dropping several bombs from one missile, spreading the damage much farther. The Iranians don’t have MIRVs, yet, but the same effect could be achieved by dropping small bombs from many jets, or shooting many nuclear rounds from tanks.

Or better still, suicide bombers could detonate bombs on building rooftops built miles apart. The US Army’s Mk-54 SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) weighs a little over 50 pounds and literally fits into a backpack. Backpacks could be placed in minivans left on parking ramp rooftops. Nuclear bombs could be quietly infiltrated one-at-a-time over months until enough are assembled for a massive strike.

There are parking ramps at Mall of America, downtown Minneapolis, Southdale and Maple Grove Crossing. Terrorists could drive their minivans to their assigned parking ramps at 5:00 a.m., set their timers for 12 hours, take a Metro Transit bus to catch the Empire Builder at the Amtrak station and be drunk in Chicago when Keith Ellison’s congressional district disappears.

If a schmuck lawyer in St. Paul can figure this out, people who spend their entire lives studying warfare in the Middle East can figure it out. Taking down Tel Aviv would be more difficult only because the Israelis work very hard to prevent it. And because the Iranians don’t have nukes. Yet.

The Obama Administration asks us to believe that religious fanatics who are literally on a mission from God will turn aside from carrying out the mission when they finally have the means at hand. I am not persuaded.

Joe Doakes.

The administration doesn’t believe it – and to be fair, most people don’t, either.

“Normalcy bias” – the belief that tomorrow will probably be about the same as today – is a fairly normal phenomenon among individuals, to say nothing of institutions.

At 6 AM on December 7, 1941, most Americans believed there would eventually be a war with Japan. Most would have said you were nuts if you had said you believed that they’d be in the middle of it within two hours.

Here’s the Minnesota Republic.

And here’s the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance; come out Thursday to rally for the three good gun bills.

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,

• Andrew Rothman of GOCRA on the good and bad gun bills in the legislature right now, and your chance to help out
• Allison Maass of the Minnesota Republic – the University of Minnesota’s conservative newspaper –” freedom of speech” at the University.

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!

To:  The Entire Gay Movement:
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  The Mote

Dear Every Gay In The World,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m a conservative – but I can’t say as I’ve ever hated gays.  Indeed, I’ve probably done more to fight the overt, physical hatred of gays than most of you have.  And the simple fact is, after over a decade as a single parent, I have barely had time or energy to put into my own sexuality, much less bother with anyone else’s.

Now, I’ve had my beefs with you all – the whole “if you oppose gay marriage, you are teh bigot!” campaign was a crime against logic.

And while I don’t believe anyone would “choose” to be gay, there’s actually nearly no evidence that it’s genetic, either.  Most of what I’ve read makes me think it’s an adaptation.

And y’know what?  I don’t care; God loves you all, and it’s not for me not to, even if I were so inclined, which I’m not.

I don’t care much for “identity” movements, since they tend to politicize things that ought not be politicized.  But I get it; decades of repression, yadda yadda.  I’ll call it square.

But I’ll just say your whole “want to be accepted” thing would sit a lot easier with real humans if Dan Savage hadn’t appointed himself your spokesbeing.  Emphasis added by yours truly:

A few days ago, Savage told the Family Research Council’s Josh Duggar of “19 Kids and Counting” to “go f**k yourself” after Duggar posted a picture with Rick Santorum. Savage then made a child molestation joke against Pope John Paul II, and now he’s going after the GOP. After Ben Carson said that he believes being gay “is absolutely a choice” in an interview with CNN March 4, Dan Savage tweeted out: “Being gay is a choice? Prove it: Choose it yourself. Suck my dick.”

Dan Savage; anti-bullying crusader.

Please pass the word to Mr. Savage (and I ask this not because I think y’all have a secret underground network, but just on the off-chance that someone out there knows that big arrogant trained chimp) that he would seem to find cognitive dissonance more threatening than does the most inbred redneck.

And that’s a bad thing.

That is all.

I mean, the jokes pretty much write themselves.

I’ve always liked Curt Schilling.

Partly because he was a great pitcher, instrumental in breaking the Red Sox’ World Series curse.

Partly because he’s one of very few baseball players to come out of the closet as a conservative.

And partly because he opened a can of medieval online whoopass on some internet creeps who tried to professorbilly his daughter online.

Some Twin Cities leftybloggers might be feeling the heat.  Just saying.