SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting on his porch, working on his next book project.  

Avery LIBRELLE walks through the gate from his back yard and toward the sidewalk.

BERG:  Um, hello, Avery?  Hanging out in my back yard, were we?

LIBRELLE:  Oh, I was sorting your trash.

BERG:  Looking for recyclables?

LIBRELLE:  No.  Evidence of thoughtcrime.

BERG:  Huh. I burn all of that.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  There’s some evidence of thoughtcrime!

BERG:  Of course.

LIBRELLE:  Hey – speaking of thoughtcrime – Ben Carson is a hypocrite.  He speaks out against welfare – but he and his mother used it!

BERG:  Yeah, I just saw the photomeme your side has been passing around:

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Hypocrite!  His entire success was rooted in the welfare system!  Hypocrite!

BERG:  Well, if his entire success was rooted in the system, then every child growing up on welfare would be a doctor or a lawyer, wouldn’t they?

LIBRELLE:  He’s still a hypocrite!

BERG:  OK, let’s just for get for a moment that the whole “argument” is a logical fallacy…

LIBRELLE:  That’s a stereotype!  Trigger warning!  Trigger warning!

BERG:  No, fallacy.  It’s a Tu Quoque Ad Hominem – saying that because someone has ever said, or done, or believed something that’s at odds with their argument, their argument is invalid.  It’s like saying because someone was once in the Klan, they could never speak out against the Klan.

LIBRELLE:  But he’s not a former Klan member!  His mom was on welfare!  He grew up in the system!  It made him what he is today!

BERG:  So you’re claiming credit for Ben Carson’s success on behalf of the welfare system?  Fair enough.  Will you claim “credit” for all the people of all races who’ve become multi-generational dependents of the system?

LIBRELLE:  There is no such thing!  The science is settled!

BERG:  Of course it is.  Look – what you are saying is this; if someone’s ancestors went on welfare, to which they are entitled – because welfare is, for better or worse, an entitlement in this country – and that person not only uses the system exactly the way it was intended to be used, but goes on to succeed far above and beyond any rational expectations, that person isn’t allowed to point out what an exception to the rule he is, and how the welfare system as it is today *harms* the upward mobility that he experienced?

In other words, if you’re born into the system, don’t care speak out against the system, because the system owns you and everything you are, think and believe, forever?

Doesn’t that pretty much prove Carson correct?  That you, the system’s supporter, are using it as a form of intellectual indentured servitude?

LIBRELLE:  Steven Colbert!  John Oliver!  Rachel Maddow!  Neil DeGrasse Tyson!

BERG:  Of course.

(And SCENE)

Minnesota’s gun grabbing DFL legislators have been beaten senseless, session after session after session, for well over a decade and a half now.Apparently they don’t get the hint.  From MNGOPAC:

Norton is still working on crafting the bill but said her legislation will focus on making it easier to keep track of gun ownership. She noted that if she sells her kayak to someone, she has to register who she gave it to and questions why the same laws don’t always apply in the case of firearms.”

Dear Representative Norton: you’re retiring from office after the session. It’s probably a good thing.

It’ll be interesting to know how the person the DFL endorses to try and hold your seat stands on this.

Scott Walker gets serious about domestic policy as Hurricane Donald enters its eighth week, launching a salvo at the public employee unions:

At a town hall meeting in Las Vegas, Walker will propose eliminating unions for employees of the federal government, making all workplaces right-to-work unless individual states vote otherwise, scrapping the federal agency that oversees unfair labor practices and making it more difficult for unions to organize.

Many of Walker’s proposals are focused on unions for workers at all levels of government, while others would also affect private-sector unions. Labor law experts said such an effort, if successful, would substantially reduce the power of organized labor in America.

Mr. Dilettante on why it’s important:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Kim Davis, the Apostolic Christian who was elected County Clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Supreme Court decision in June, citing her First Amendment right to a workplace accommodation based on a sincerely held religious belief.  It’s the same argument made by Muslim check-out clerks working for Target who refuse to scan SPAM because it contains pork.

A local judge ordered Ms. Davis to issue licenses for gay marriage and sent her to jail for contempt but a federal judge released her after five days.  A Deputy Clerk in the office is issuing marriage licenses to gays while Ms. Davis is out of the office but the drive-by and social media storm is relentless and seems to boil down to:

The Apostolic Christian religion does not prohibit gay marriage in the way that, say, the Roman Catholic Church does; therefore, Ms. Davis does not have a sincerely held religious belief and is not entitled to a workplace accommodation.

The Apostolic Christian religion does prohibit gay marriage, which is a hateful and bigoted theology; therefore, Ms. Davis should receive no accommodation for her sincerely held – but politically incorrect – religious belief.

The Apostolic Christian religion prohibits gay marriage but permits divorce meaning the religion doesn’t believe in the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and thus cannot prohibit homosexual marriage in the way that, say, the Anglican Church did from 1534 until 2003; therefore, it’s an illogical religion so its adherents are not entitled to a workplace accommodation.

Even though the Apostolic Christian religion permits heterosexual divorce while prohibiting homosexual marriage and Ms. Davis sincerely believes in her religion, she is a sinner and sinners are not entitled to Constitutional rights.

American government officials should not be allowed to hold Christian religious beliefs and thus won’t need workplace accommodations, a logical expansion of the Act of Settlement of 1701 that prohibited British Catholics from holding any position of trust.

Ms. Davis is from The South but is neither Liberal nor photogenic; therefore, she has no Constitutional rights at all.

I remain unpersuaded.

Joe Doakes

The US Government will eventually establish a state religion, by defining all the things that people of faith can’t do.

By the beginning of September in 1915, Europe had been at war for over a year – a year of bloodshed and loss for the Entente.

The Western Powers of the Entente were locked in the static horror of the trenches.  The Russians were slowly losing their eastern European empire, en route to losing 2 million men in 1915 alone.  And the British were desperately throwing themselves against the Dardanelles while already contemplating a humiliating retreat.  Yet despite their victories, the Central Powers seemed no closer to ending the war than the Entente.  For both sides, their visions of victory – yet alone their rationales for fighting – were sinking into a murky morass of blood and mud.

But in the small village of Zimmerwald, Switzerland, a vision for the end of the war was beginning to form – a vision of revolution.

—

The Revolutionary in Obscurity – Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov in Switzerland in 1914

From September 5th to 8th, 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, the Great War was reduced to a war of words.  The combatants were not heads of state, military leaders, or even prominent civic leaders.  Rather, the attendees were there precisely because they lacked any real role among the warring governments.     (more…)

Pacifica Radio – the nation’s “oldest leftwing radio network” – has entered a death spiral:

Founded in 1946 by conscientious objectors from the second world war, the network was an influential outlet for Beat poets, Bob Dylan and Vietnam war protesters but has in recent times suffered from dwindling ratings, in-fighting and financial hemorrhage.

The network’s biggest star – Amy Goodman, host of the independently produced Democracy Now! – is also its biggest creditor. She is owed an estimated $2.1m in unpaid broadcast fees.

Observers trace the travails to 2001 when a group of rebellious listeners and broadcasters took control and instituted an elaborate governance structure of multiple boards, sub-committees and painstaking elections.

The result, according to Matthew Lasar, author of the 2005 book Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War, was continuous feuding between rival factions. In a Nation article earlier this year, he compared the network to the “late Ottoman Empire of public broadcasting” and urged progressive outsiders to step in and save it before it was too late.

Of course, it’s not just Pacifica; all of the institutional broadcasting industry as we’ve known it since the 1930’s is undergoing a radical realignment in how it does business.  The broadcast industry one step behind newspapers; its audience gutted by the internet’s explosion of free material and advertisters’ splitting their money in many different directions (what’s left of it, anyway, in the Obama economy), even the better commercial broadcast operations are having to become very lean, and very creative when it comes to sales.

And Pacifica?  Not only is it entirely dependent on handouts from non-profits and governments, but it is “creative” in all the wrong ways:

Ian Masters and Sonali Kolhatkar, hosts of the Los Angeles-based KPFK, said its parent network Pacifica Radio, the country’s oldest public radio network, was putting pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay, leave or work for free, alienating listeners and approaching a point of no return.

“This is the end. They’re running out of road,” Masters told the Guardian. He accused managers and board members of promoting conspiracy theories – including those related to the “truth” about 9/11 and claims about cancer and HIV. “They’ve run this place into the ground.”

Today it’s Pacifica.

Of course, it’s been happening in commercial radio for a long time; commercial radio stations have been slashing costs for a solid decade now (most music radio is “voice-tracked”; the “disc jockey” actually bangs out all the spoken elements for a show in one sitting, and the computers that run the shows slip the spoken bits in to the right spots, usually), finding creative ways to make money (or not so creative ways; 40% of the revenue at many talk stations comes from weekend infomercials) or avoid it (the NARN was a decade ahead of the trend of people doing talk radio as a hobby, barring the occasional talent fee).

So how long can public radio – especially Minnesota Public Radio, with its union-level pay scales and lavish facilities and gargantuan, padded staffs – survive?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals never admit to being Liberal, they always claim to be Moderates who represent the mainstream of American political thought, not like those extremist right-wing Republicans.

Try this experiment: ask them to name prominent far-left politicians, the people on the radical fringe.

President Obama and Hilary Clinton, are they far-left?  No, they’re Moderates.

Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, are they radical leftists?  No, they’re Moderates, too.

Look, if everybody is to the Right of you and nobody is to the Left of you, then by definition you are not the Moderate Middle; you ARE the Lunatic Fringe.  Welcome to the asylum.

Joe Doakes

From Moorhead, Detroit Lakes is “Eastern Minnesota”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In a comment to an earlier thread, Emery wrote:
“The free movement of capital.
The free movement of goods and services.
The free movement of ideas and media.
The free movement of people.
The protection of private property.
I’m not a starry-eyed idealist, but I like to think that there is a liberal ideal that we should keep our eyes on, not necessarily as a realistic objective for today, but as a goal to strive for.”
My response is that all that free movement stuff sounds great in theory but I’m wondering about it in practice.  I just poured myself a cup of coffee and dumped in a packet of sugar.  I haven’t stirred it, yet.  The sugar is  concentrated in a heap of sweetness on the bottom of the cup.  That’s America.  The coffee in the rest of the cup is bitter.  That’s the rest of the world.  If I stir the cup, the sweetness will be distributed everywhere, but that also means it will be diluted everywhere.  No one place will be super-sweet, all will be equally semi-sweet.
Wouldn’t free movement of people and money lead to the same result? If you took all the money in America and distributed it to people across the rest of the globe, they would be enriched but we would be impoverished.  If we fling open the borders to let everybody from everywhere in the world come here, will they add to the sweetness of America by bringing prosperity and stability or subtract from it by welfare and crime?
I can see why people in the bitter lands would want their lives to become sweeter.  I can’t see why people in the super-sweet lands would want their lives to become more bitter.  As I cannot be guaranteed the glorious result would obtain, a conservative would eschew the experiment.
Joe Doakes

Perverse incentives?  I get it.

Perverse wishes?  Not so much.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The American Revolutionaries wore brown clothes and hid behind trees and rocks to shoot at British soldiers wearing red jackets marching in straight lines.  This was a violation of the “rules of war” of that time period. The familiar Geneva Convention “rules of war” were crafted after World War I to protect draftees compelled to fight for nation-states. Modern military theorists talk of 4th Generation Warfare in which large formations of men and machines are useless against small, agile teams of mobile warriors, like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a sledge hammer.
Iraq War I, with Stormin’ Norman’s giant lines of tanks encircling armies in Kuwait, was 3rd Generation Warfare, as was much of Iraq War II.  Some parts of America’s military have been learning to fight 4th Generation Warfare, notably the SEALs who fought in Afghanistan.  But they’re still America’s warriors, they serve the nation of the United States.
But what is the United States?  A geographical location?  A shared belief?  A place where groups struggle against each other: rich against poor, Black against White?  Barack Obama seems intent on transforming the United States into something different from what it was then Bush The Elder was President.  What if President Obama is ahead of his time?  What if nation-states are obsolete?  What if the United States is obsolete?  Nations arose out of tribes, what comes after nations?  Maybe by transforming the United States into a collection of factions contesting against each other, he’s moving us toward 4th Generation Society.
Question is:  would that be a good thing?
Joe Doakes

Good for whom?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hilary was appointed Secretary of State by President Obama.

She immediately set up a private email account and used it for official government business.

Hilary’s non-secure email account was maintained by Platte River Networks, a mom-and-pop operation in Denver, not by the government.

We don’t know why she chose them out of everybody in the world.

Some of the email on her account contained Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.

TS/SCI is maintained on secure government computers that are not physically capable of connecting to non-secure computers.

The only way TS/SCI information could have gotten into Hilary’s non-secure email system is if someone inside who had TS/SCI clearance accessed the TS/SCI information on the government’s secure computer, downloaded it to a disk and walked the disk over to a non-secure computer to send it to Hilary’s non-secure email account.

We don’t know who did that for her or how often or who authorized it.

The people at Platte River didn’t have TS/SCI clearance to handle those emails.

Platte River had back-up servers, we think, but nobody knows for sure where they are or what’s on them or who has access to them.

When asked to produce the emails, Platte River downloaded them from their non-secure server to a jump drive and gave the jump drive to Hilary’s lawyer, David Kendell, who may have had TS/SCI clearance years ago but may not now.

When the FBI received the actual non-secure server, it had been wiped, leaving Kendell’s jump drive the only copy, we think.

We don’t know if David Kendell copied the emails from the jump drive to a non-secure law firm computer.

David Kendell’s law firm gave printed copies of some of the TS/SCI emails to the Justice Department, the relevant ones.

We don’t know who reviewed all the emails to determine the relevant ones, or what that person’s security clearance is.

We don’t know who printed those copies or what that person’s security clearance is.

We don’t know if the law firm made photocopies of the printed copies it delivered to the Justice Department or what the copy girl’s clearance is.

State Department officials have refused to testify as to the “chain of custody” of Hilary’s emails or list everyone who had access to them.

She’s going to get away with it.

Joe Doakes

Nobody every went broke underestimating the extent Washington will roll over for the Clinton clan.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two teachers at Washington State University will lower grades for students who say “illegal alien” or “male” or “female” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students.  Tuition and fees range from $15,000 (in-state) to $25,000 (out-state).

You get what you pay for?

Joe Doakes

Well, the taxpayers sure don’t.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Stillwater turned down a gun range – it would have taken up too much of the land set aside for an office park – but Oakdale approved one, soon to the largest in the state.

Hopeful signs in a time of increasingly shrill demands for gun control.

joe doakes

The demands are indeed getting shrill – which is much better than 25 years ago, when they were confident and self-assured.

They’re shrill because they’re losing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mark Dayton criticized Black Lives Matter protestors chanting at the State Fair about killing cops.

BLM’s response: it’s disrespectful to criticize Black people for chanting about killing cops.

Way to go, Governor.  Didn’t think you had it in you.

Joe Doakes

The stopped clock is right twice a day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Stole this from Brad Torgersen’s Facebook page (he’s a SF writer, one of the people who ran Sad Puppies).

 

It’s probably only funny to those of us old enough to remember, but I found it hilarious . . . .

 

Joe Doakes

I wonder if my kids would even remember what a floppy drive is?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In a comment to “A Bad Idea Whose Time Will Never Come,” Troy linked to a State of Minnesota website about job safety.  Their goal is to reduce the number of worker’s comp accidents from 4.3 down to 2.5.

 

Does that mean state government WANTS 2.5 employees injured or killed on the job?  Of course not.  Every injury or death is a tragedy to the people involved.  But in a large and diverse workforce engaged in hazardous duties, some injuries and deaths are inevitable and unavoidable.  The state isn’t attempting to eliminate all injuries and deaths, they’ve set a realistic and obtainable goal to work toward.  2.5 isn’t the optimum level, but it’s an acceptable level.  Having decided that, they can adopt practices to reach that goal.

Gun Control advocates often justify their demands saying “if it saves even one life” but zero deaths is just as much an unrealistic and unobtainable goal as zero worker’s comp injuries.  There are 320,000,000 people in the United States, 2,500,000 of whom die every year.  Every injury or death involving a firearm is a tragedy to the people involved.  But society must set a realistic and obtainable goal to work toward.

How many people should die each year in firearms related incidents – suicide, death by cop, gang warfare, mass shootings?  What’s the “acceptable level?”  Until we decide that, we can’t adopt practices to reach the goal.

Joe Doakes

For purposes of setting actual, workable policy?  Joe is right.

For purposes of shoving chanting points at the ignorant?  Realism is irrelevant.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Just read your post on the Rising Sun flag.  Outstanding.

 Now that you a First Ringer have got that war cleared up, here’s a start on the next project . . . .

(hat tip: Powerline)

Joe Doakes

Something along those lines will no doubt be part of the “Cold War:  Fact and Myth” series that is brewing…

…conveniently, mostly after we, God willing, finish the “World War I” series.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live at the Minnesota State Fair COM from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• Colin Wilkinson joins us to talk about the GOP Freedom Rally with Jason Lewis this Sunday.
• We’ll talk about the COPS (Citizens Organized for Police Safety) vigil next Saturday night at the Capitol.
• Patty Boyd from Minnesota Fallen Heroes Remembered will talk about the 2016 calendar.  .

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!

I’m one to try to ascribe divinity to random happenstance.  I’m really not.

Especially when actual people are dead.

So call me a sinner if you will – we all are – or just wildly inappropriate; I’ll cop to it.  But I will admit to seeing this happening at roughly the same time this happened, just in time for one of our most wrenching secular anniversaries,  and going “hmmm”.

Because I’m an oratory junkie…

…and because this is a damn fine moment of it.

Nobody who was old enough to remember has forgotten 9/11.

The idea that people will forget the actual event is the least of my worries, to be honest.

My worry?  That the US, 14 years later, has learned all the wrong lessons.

America; Heck Yeah:  Too many of my conservative allies think that military strength, qua military strength, along with adopting a siege mentality expressed in TSA lines and an ever-more-rapacious internal spying apparatus, is the answer.

It’s not that we don’t need intelligence – or, for that matter, security (not that the CIA, NSA, or TSA are good at either one).

But the trickle-down effect of all of this official hypervigilance is that, to way too many in official America, it’s a short jaunt from “we’ve got to stop terrorists by all means necessary”…

…to “we’ve got to stop anything and everything that gets in our way by all means necessary.

We, the People, pay (a lot) for security.  We should not be considered vassals as part of the bargain.

Peace Through Smugness:  My Libertarian friends, if anything, learned an equally fallacious lesson; the idea that if we just keep our nose out of everything, everywhere, everyone else will return the favor.  Thence, they turned to a “foreign policy” stance dominated almost entirely by slogans and photo-memes…

…designed to give a bunch of people with a very dubious knowledge of history a set of extremely simple chanting points to repeat endlessly.

They – and I’m just talking about the smart ones, here, not the unseemly number of Libertarians who are busily buzzing about conspiracy theories and endlessly re-looping the collapse of Building Seven today – seem smitten with the notion that since ISIS hasn’t attacked us, and Iran hasn’t attacked  Israel yet, they never will.  Tell me, Ronulans – what “war propaganda” brought war to the Kurds?  The Yazidi?  The Lebanese Christians of 1980?  The Norwegians and Danes and Dutch and Belgians and Letzenbürgers of 1940?   The Jews of 1936 (not that all of you believe it happened)?  The Ukrainians of 1933?   The Armenians of 1915?  The Native Americans, for that matter, from 1776 to 1890?  What “lies” did any of them tell that led to their being attacked, conquered, murdered?   And chanting “it’s all still government’s fault” dodges the question so ludicriously that I, for one, had to answer it in satire, the only medium that allows us to give this sort of “reasoning” the response it is due.

And that’s not even to say that they, or even Ron Paul, are wrong; there is absolutely nothing wrong with restrained peace through strength.   Even Ron Paul said as much – although that’s a quote some of his more monomaniacal personality cultists miss, as they chatter on calling most of the GOP candidates for president “warvangelicals” – as if showing Iran that one is more than willing to meet aggression with aggression isn’t the right idea; as if “government” is the sole problem, and human nature is irrelevant, and “evil” doesn’t exist and/or is manifested solely through government.

“Hell No!  We Won’t Reason!”:  And all of them – the conservative security zealots, the Ron Paul personality cult – at least learned to defer, respectively, to security and freedom.

Our loathsome left, after latching onto the move to invade Iraq with both hands, then flipping when the war got complicated, then flopping back after the surge stabilized the situation, then vicariously sharing in the Nobel Prize that The Lightworker “won” for continuing the Bush policy (with more drones, natch), then washing their hands of nightmare that ensued (exactly as predicted in this space) when Obama, eager to cash an economically negligible but politically succulent “peace dividend”, pulled the troops out long before it was advisable, but exactly after using the US’s dubious diplomatic savvy to destabilize Syria and Libya and Yemen, leaving them ripe for ISIS and the Iranians.

No matter to them; the  whole thing has given the Big Left the opportunity to re-live its glorious youth – the sixties and seventies, when the anti-war movement shouldered the “America First” Democrats out of the spotlight, and did to the Vietnamese…

…pretty much what President Obama and Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry have been doing to the Libyans, the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Kurds.

So what has the left learned?    Never waste a crisis.

So it’s the 14th anniversary of 9/11.  Where are we?

I’m almost afraid to ask.

So I’ll refer you to a piece I wrote four years ago, dedicated to the people who’ve done the real learning, and suffering, and fighting; the ones that’ve accomplished pretty much anything of any value in this past fourteen years; our servicepeople and their families.

From the beginning of the planning for the useless monument to the “wisdom” of our sitting government that the Met Council is pleased to call the Green Line, I accepted a few things as givens.

I accepted that the traffic, never pleasant on University Avenue, was going to turn into a Sisyphean ordeal.

I accepted that businesses more than a block or two from the stops, and businesses that depended on people making impulsive left turns for roughly half of their business, were going to have trouble.  Didn’t like it, but what are you gonna do?

I accepted that the parts of University Avenue that weren’t gentrified into ridiculousness would become even more blighted than they were.

I even accepted that the entire thing was a mammoth exercise in picking winners and losers – the stores, constituents and ethnic groups that were more favored by the city came out better than those that were not.  It was a great thing for DFL-voting fans of “high density” living along the corridor – white, middle class, middle-aged, professional.  It was an OK thing for people who owned, or could obtain, or could afford to continue, businesses within easy and convenient walking distance of the stops.

All I asked – well, not all I asked, but the big favor to which I supplicated the demons of urban “progress” – was, whatever else you eff up, at least leave the Russian Tea House alone.

The Russian Tea House, a little hole in the wall at University at Fairview that sells the best piroshki, vareniki, borscht and other Russian goodies anywhere in town, is taking it in the shorts, naturally; the train from hell, which has blocked off all left turns that used to lead to the little restaurant, has slashed traffic to the store so badly, they’re down to one day a week:

“The first day they started ripping things out, a quarter of my customers went away. For the three years, I shut down for the whole summer,” he said. “All during construction, business was really bad. Now that the Green Line is open, there are no left hand turns, no parking in the street. The regular busses still stop, and if you’re behind the busses, you stop every block. We’re next to Wendy’s and their business is down 25 percent.”
“We’re opened only on Fridays now because during the week, no one comes. We’re two and a half blocks from a station. No one comes off the light rail to come here. No one will want to walk from there in the winter.”

The stupid is rolling over StPaul in waves.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Never thought of this (hat tip: Powerline).

The real harm is not that Hilary had classified information on her server for our enemies to hack. That was bad.

It’s not even that she wiped the server before giving it to the FBI. That was bad, too.  

It’s that by wiping the server, she let our enemies keep the information they stole . . . but we don’t know what it was. 

Our enemies already knew what information they stole, so wiping the server didn’t harm the enemies. But by wiping the server, Hilary made it impossible for us to know what information they stole. 

Snowden told us what he stole so we know what holes to plug, what agents to pull out, what sources were compromised. But Hilary . . .

Joe Doakes

it’s hard to believe Snowden’s motivations were as cynical, or just plain slothful, as Hillary’s.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain, beneath the light of a giant Exxon sign.  

Avery LIBRELLE putters up to BERG in a Prius and climbs out of the car.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG:  Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE:  I’ve got a question for you, mister Immigrant Hater.

BERG:  Bla bla bla.  I don’t hate immigrants, and I won’t let a stupid manipulative strawman pass without showing it up as the idiocy it is.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate science?  Anyway – so it’s time for you immigration opponents…

BERG:  …We’re not “immigration opponents”.  We oppose illegal immigration.

LIBRELLE:  If NPR says it, it’s settled science.  Anyway – it’s coming time where you have to decide; are immigrants taking our jobs, or are they soaking up welfare dollars?   You can’t have both.

BERG:   Saying the two are mutually exclusive is like saying there’s no way white people could simultaneously produce Beethoven and Jefferson and James Watt while also including people who sit around Walmart parking lots lighting their beer farts and arguing about whether Van Halen is hard rock or heavy metal.

Because it’s a fact that Immigrants are disproportionally on welfare – counter to years of media chanting points – and they are also taking most of the new jobs in the Obama Economy this past seven years.  You’re presenting me a false dilemma – and, given that this policy disporoprtionally affects African-Americans, presenting yourself a real dilemma.

So there is no contradiction.  Fact is, unrestricted immigration of low-skill workers drives down the price of low-skill jobs – which aren’t worth much to begin with, and don’t pay much with the glut of workers, who have families, which disproportionally use welfare.

LIBRELLE:   Why do you hate women?

BERG:   Of course.

And SCENE.  

…I’m just curious as to when we start taking some of them at their word?

…who had no idea there was a “David Muir” out there, that he was anchoring the “ABC Nightly News”, or that there was in fact still an “ABC Nightly News?”

I mean, I never watched ABC news even when I did still watch the Big Three…

…back before about 1998.