A longtime correspondent of this blog writes:

I note that the MSM is promoting “Latino group offers $5K for calling Trump a racist on ‘SNL’”
By a Norman Mailer I’m referring to a description of his contact with feminist protesters from this article in Salon:

“For example, back when I was in college at Berkeley, I attended a lecture by then bad-boy, self-advertised anti-feminist, self-proclaimed macho-man, world-famous novelist and essayist Norman Mailer. I should mention that he had been preceded a week before by Gloria Steinem. The stage was set.  As soon as Mailer took the podium there was a smattering of shouts, signs flashed up, a protest began. He looked over the crowd and held his hands up, and said, “OK, OK.  I get it.” Things quieted down a bit.  Mailer continued,  “So everyone who thinks I’m an asshole, hiss.”  Of course the room was soon filled with violent hisses.  When they stopped Mailer smirked and said, “Obedient little bitches.””

My hope would be that Trump would come out for the opening monologue and ask everyone in the audience to join together and call him a racist, he could even hold up a cue card with the exact words, then he could hold up another cue card with the contact information for Deport Racism PAC and assure the audience that each one of them is eligible for/guaranteed a $5,000.00 reward. I figure Studio 8H has about 200 seats in it so at $5k a head that could cost the Deport Racism PAC $1.2million. Its a safe bet they would renege on the offer giving Trump & the GOP in general a lot of counter attack ammunition.

Whatever you can say about Trump – he’s not my guy – he’s one I could actually see bringing this kind of thing to the campaign.

By every rational measure, Obamacare is a complete failure – a fraternity-rush-week of terrible assumptions and economic ignorance that have turned a sixth of this nation’s economy into a hapless dumpster fire.

Kevin Williamson takes stock of the failures – and, in this notable passage, breaks down the “why” of how we got here:

The architects of Obamacare are deeply distrustful of the role of for-profit companies in the health-care business because, in their nearly pristine ignorance, they falsely believe profits to be net deductions from the sum of the public good rather than measures of the creation of real social value. So they created incentives to set up co-ops, nonprofit enterprises that would administer Obamacare plans in particular states and jurisdictions. It was obvious from the beginning that if Obamacare’s perverse incentives created insurance pools that were older and sicker rather than younger and healthier, these co-ops wouldn’t be economically viable: You need lots of young, healthy insurance subscribers to offset the costs associated with your older, sicker subscribers. Many of us — myself included — assumed that the federal government under President Obama would simply write these co-ops huge checks to keep them afloat. We were half right: The government is writing them huge checks, but they are failing anyway, so fundamental is their economic unsustainability. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail. Almost all of Obamacare’s basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess .

 

Obamacare’s partisans were confronted with the economic facts long before the law was even passed, and their answer was: “Never mind the economics, we’re the good guys, and you want poor people to die.” Democrats argued that Republicans literally wanted to kill poor people, that their plan was for the poor to “die quickly.” This is a habitual mode of discourse among progressives: Reality doesn’t matter; only the purity of Democrats’ motives matters. Obamacare is what it is: Another damned five-year plan based on wishful thinking and very little else.

Read the whole thing.

And if you haven’t read Williamson’s The End Is Near, And It’s Going To Be Awesome, get out to Amazon and do it.  Now.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Britain is ahead of the US in shifting to green power generated by wind and solar panels, the cost of which is subsidized by government.

Except when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow; then they need back-up power provided by diesel generator farms, the cost of which also is  subsidized  by government.

You might want to talk to your pals on the Met Council about requesting additional funding now to establish diesel backup generator farms alongside the solar panel farms, to keep the lights on when the sun goes down and the wind goes calm. No point waiting for a crisis to re-invent the wheel in Minnesota when we can see clearly how it’s already being done in Britain.

Joe Doakes

I know that they used to have these…things that utilized huge generators and economies of scale to generate massive amounts of power, powered by gas, oil, coal, or even nuclear power.

What were those?

Because they don’t give the faintest whiff of a rat’s patoot about gun safety.

When I was a kid, someone came into the school and gave us a quick demo and (IIRC) a film strip on actual gun safety.  It included a couple of simple rules that any kid can remember – and that I still do.  If you’re a kid, and you see a gun – your friends bring out their dad’s hunting rifle or grandpa’s WW2 pistol – and your parents aren’t there:

• Stop
• Don’t touch
• Run away
• Tell a grownup

That’s it.   That’s gun safety for kids.

There’s no way of knowing how many kids in my elementary school’s lives were saved by that lesson; not a single kid in my school died in a gun accident.  Zero.  There was a drowning, a couple car accidents, an alcohol poisoning, and a suicide right after graduation – but no gun accidents.

And this, in a part of the country where there are likely more guns per-capita than on bases for some branches of the military.

It’s a pretty standard program; many hunting groups, along with the NRA, teach gun safety in schools.

Y’know – because it keeps children from getting killed, accidentally.

You’d think moms (not to mention fathers) would be all over it.  And in the parts of our society ruled by common sense, they are.

But not I Moms Want Action (a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown For “Gun Safety”, the billionaire’s gun-grabber group),   To them, “gun safety” is, in their own words, “atrocious”:

Moms Demand Action’s Jennifer Hoppe recoiled at the news that Forest Hills was teaching children about gun safety. She said, “It’s atrocious to put the onus of gun safety onto children — this is an adult problem. Every gun that’s gotten into the hands of a child has first been under the control of an adult. A program that tries to dodge that is disingenuous.”

In a further effort to make her point, Hoppe added, “Accidental gun deaths among children are not ‘accidental,’” suggesting that the focus should be on how they are “preventable” if adults store guns properly.

Which is the sort of calm, cool, rational logic we’ve come to expect from Moms Want Action.  No, seriously.

Because in a world where our leftist entertainment industry gives money to gun-grabber groups with one hand, while glorifying consequence-free violence with the other, there are plenty of irresponsible parents out there, leaving guns in easy reach of kids.  And that is certainly a moral, and often literal, crime – which is nice, but what does your kid do when he or she comes face to face with their kids, acting like kids?

Question for you, Jennifer Hoppe, Jane Kay, Michael Bloomberg and Heather Martens:  would you be happier if your kid knew to stop, run away and tell an adult, or would you prefer the county attorney sort it all out after the funeral?

The article points out something I’d missed.  Usually, when a gun-grabber yaps about wanting a “conversation about guns,” what they mean is “you shooters shut up while we shriek at you”.

But Mark Kelly – wife of Gabby Giffords, and certainly no gun-rights advocate – actually indulged in that rarest of treats; he actually conversed about guns, complimenting the NRA’s exceptionally-effective child safety program.

The results were…predictable:

Ironically, it was just months ago that Huffington Post went comparably apoplectic after gun control proponent Mark Kelly praised the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program for its effectiveness with children. On April 14, Kelly tweeted: “I don’t agree w/ the NRA on some big issues, but they deserve a lot of credit for teaching kids about gun safety [via] Eddie Eagle.”

The reaction from the left was predictably emotionally-thud-witted, intellectually barren and morally bereft.

Dear Moms Want Action:  the blood of every child accidentally killed for want of commonsense gun-safety education is on your desiccated talons.

Day in, day out, month then, month, as the seasons change in the years slide by, some things never, ever, ever change.

(Via Nachman)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama and Candidate Clinton suggest The Australian plan: ban possession of guns and ammo, buy-back from those who will voluntarily participate, and wait for attrition to eliminate the rest.

How does this plan differ from the federal government’s treatment of cocaine, which has been banned for 101 years but remains widely available and reasonably priced?

Put another way, which is harder to smuggle into the country: a pound of cocaine or a pound of bullets?
Joe Doakes

Obamas inability to learn from world history is legendary.

Why would American history be any different?

I got this via email yesterday, in response to Tuesday’s SITD Saint Paul Voter Guide:

Mitch
You are quite mean spirited aren’t you.
[Redacted]

Because in the world of the Saint Paul DFLer, dissent, satire, humor (even if not all that good) and criticism of the Dear DFL Leadership is “mean”.

Guess I’m lucky it wasn’t “hate” this time.

Off-year election results around the country were a mixed bag.

And by “mixed”, I mean generally good for conservative Republicans nationwide, and six of one, half a dozen of the other in Minnesota.

Tinkering With Leviathan:   Saint Paul’s elections yesterday, were a victory for DFL zealots over DFL extremists.

The City Council gained two councilors who ran on an agenda critical of Mayor Chris Coleman.   This can, in some ways, be read as a very mild moderate win – Jane Prince, who ran unopposed in Ward 7, and Rebecca Noeker (who is currently leading by a razor-thin margin as the “Instant Runoff” counting slogs on and on in Ward 2) ran in opposition to Mayor Coleman’s profligate subsidies of favored businesses via “Tax Increment Financing”, as well as his botched plan to install parking meters on Grand Avenue to try to chisel revenue out of shoppers in Saint Paul’s only successful mid-market retail district.

But I wouldn’t count on much change from the Council on the larger issues that are sandbagging Saint Paul; the stifling regulatory environment, the obeisance to the Met Council’s lust for 19th-century transit, and the crime problems that are percolating along University and out on the East Side.

Meet the New Boss, Same As The Old Boss:  The Saint Paul School Board election, as predicted, installed the four union-backed wholly union-owned candidates over the four formerly union-owned candidates. Whatever residue of independence from the Teachers Union that might have existed in the Saint Paul public schools will be hunted down and buried in concrete shortly.

While changing Superintendent Silva’s intensely unpopular disciplinary policies may be one of the upshots of yesterday’s elections, look for the fiscal profligacy and unaccountability to accelerate.

The election will be a great boon to charter schools – if Saint Paul parents are smart.

Schools Dazed:  The referenda in the various school districts around the east metro went about 50-50; the pattern seemed to be, broadly, that voters approved the bond levies for maintenance and repairs, but voted down the big additions to infrastructure and programming.

Which may show – who knows? – that voters are still manipulable by demands “for the children”, but they have their limits.

We’ll see.

The Gathering Storm?:  Around the country, the news was less ambiguous.  A Republican not only won the Kentucky governor’s race. but so did his black Tea Party Republican Lieutenant Governor.  In VIrginia, Michael Bloomberg, hoping in his ghoulish way to capitalize on the deaths of a couple of TV reporters, pumped a ton of money and a lot of agenda into a couple of key races, with control of the Virginia state senate on the line.  It flopped; just as in Colorado a couple of years ago, only in the most addlepated coastal hothouses can gun control get any popular traction.

In Houston, a referendum on gay rights got swept away in a vote that would be hard to see as anything but a backlash against the creeping fascism of the Social Justice Warriors and their waves of lawsuits and coercion against supporters of traditional marriage.  And even in San Francisco, the sanctuary-city-promoting sheriff got sent packing.

It’s a year ’til the next election.  Look for “progressives” with deep pockets to spend a ton of money to try to iron out the wrinkles in the narrative.

Obama’s “smart diplomacy” in action.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The child’s book “If you give a mouse a cookie” is held up as an illustration of federal welfare policy, but it’s missing an essential component: the threat.

Mother gives birth but can’t afford to feed Child. What should happen?

Mother gives Child up for adoption? No, Mother threatens to let Child starve to death – unless federal government pays up.

So, to save Child’s life, federal government takes money away from Stranger to give to Mother to purchase food Child.

But Child needs more than food, Child needs shelter. Mother threatens to let Child freeze to death, so Fed takes Stranger’s money to pay for Mother’s rent.

A sick Child needs medical treatment. Mother threatens to let Child die, so Fed takes . . . .

The threat is never explicit; it doesn’t need to be. We know Child will die if we don’t pay up if we don’t meet this ransom demand, and the next, and the next.

It’s not actually like giving a mouse a cookie, it’s more like The Spanish Prisoner. And everybody knows that’s an unconscionable scam.

Joe Doakes

That, of course, is one of the things progressivism does these days; makes things that used to be unconscionable into kids stories.

There are two main elections in Saint Paul today – for City Council, and to fill four seats on the School Board.

I’ll address them both today.

City Council

• Ward 1:  DFLer Dai Thao is running against another cookie-cutter DFLer Tahern Crews, a Green Party candidate (h/t Fred Melo for the correction).  Tomayto tomahto.
• Ward 2:  A bunch of cookie-cutter DFLers – no, I mean a bunch.  A gaggle.  if they were crows, they’d be a “Murder”, and they could actually divide into two Murders.  And Bob Hosko, who’s a fairly conservative Democrat and a Saint Paul businessman, but has no money.  If you live in 2, for Hosko.  Since Saint Paul uses Instant Runoff voting, if enough people got out and voted Hosko, there’d actually be a chance to make a difference.
• Ward 3:  DFLer Chris Tolbert is running without opposition.   It should tell you something that Tolbert is probably one of the least awful members of the council.
• Ward 4:  Incumbent DFL extremist Russ Stark is running against challenger DFL extremist Tom Goldstein.  This is my ward. I will be writing in my senior cat, Nosemarie Berg.  I urge you to do the same, as there will be absolutely no tangible difference between Goldstein and Stark if you’re a Saint Paul taxpayer; they’ll be functionally identical.
• Ward 5:  Incumbent DFLer Amy Brendemoen’s only mistake was that she used her position to muscle David Glass – a fellow DFL activist – out of his lease at Black Bear Crossing.   Glass – an utterly conventional DFLer in every way – is challenging.  Potayto Potahto.  There’s an independence party candidate in the race too, and like everything to do with the Independence Party I’m already bored writing about it, but I urge you to vote for the IP person, whoever it is.
• Ward 6:  Dan Bostrom – probably the closest thing to “moderate” on the City Council, which pisses the orthodox wing of the DFL off to no end – is running against a couple of people who will be forgotten to history in about 24 hours.  Vote for the moon for all it matters.
• Ward 7:  Jane Prince – a DFLer most famous as former Senator Ellen Anderson’s legislative assistant – is running unopposed.   While Prince, like Anderson, if far enough to the left to make the ghost of Paul Wellstone sit up in his grave and say “dial it back a notch, Janie”, she was actually superb at customer service when she was Anderson’s LA.  Since she’s unopposed, what the hell.  Vote for her.  Once.
• Ward 8:  There is technically no Ward 8 in Saint Paul.  It is kept in reserve, against a hypothetical future threat to DFL hegemony, when the ward and its thousands of DFL votes will be pulled out of a file box in a warehouse on Plato Boulevard.

Saint Paul School Board

Back in the eighties, Carl Sagan – who was sort of the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the 1980s – referred to the nuclear arms race between the USA and USSR as “two bald men fighting over a comb”.  While Sagan was no more sage a political commentator than DeGrasse Tyson, the analogy is apt in this “race”.

This race will fill four open seats on the at-large school board.  While there are quite a few candidates, the actual race boils down to a donnybrook between…:

• Four formerly-DFL-and-Teachers Union endorsed candidates who have sided with current Superintendent Valeria Silva, and who have helped preside over the last five years of the wheels coming off in the Saint Paul Schools, versus:
• Four people now endorsed by the DFL and Teachers union, who want to change superintendents but otherwise keep the status quo.  A vote for the “challenger” is, in fact, a vote for complete, unfettered union control of the district and its money.

The outcome of the battle between last cycle’s DFLers and this cycle’s DFLers will mean precisely as much to the students and families of Saint Paul as the battle between Al Capone and Bugsy Moran meant to the poor immigrants of Chicago.

So in this election, I’ll be voting:

1. Aaron Benner – the one, single solitary person on the ballot who proposes any meaningful, worthwhile change.  He’s run an underfunded campaign, and I’m not even sure he’s more than a warm body on the ballot at the moment – but I’ll be voting for him.
2. Clu Berg, my golden retriever
3. Puff Berg, my junior cat
4. Greg Copeland

And I’m pretty convinced my votes will do more to further kids’ education than either of the major slates.

UPDATE:  Yep, Jane Prince worked for former St. Paul City councilman Jay Benanav, not former State Senator Ellen Anderson.

DFL pols in Saint Paul all sort of run together after a while.

Some European countries aren’t having epochal refugee crises:

Other countries without an extensive welfare state don’t seem to have Sweden’s problem. Reuters reported that Lithuania “is throwing its doors open to refugees fleeing war and hardship in the Middle East, but is finding few takers.” Rimantas Vaitkus, deputy chancellor of the Lithuanian government, told the news agency: “We are prepared to accept refugees immediately, but there are no refugees in Italy or Greece who agreed to resettle in Lithuania. . . . It seems that refugees know about Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, which either have generous social security or have been actively attracting immigrants.”

Huh.

There simply must be some mistake.

South Washington Citizens for Change, as well as District 833 school board candidate Andrea Mayer-Bruestle – have released a couple of videos that voters should think about, both for their school board vote and their vote on the bonding referendum this Tuesday.

First: Don’t think all that half-a-billion dollars is going to go toward more spending beyond the means, and District 833 will be bellying up to the taxpayer bar again in a couple years? Don’t bet on it:

And here’s a digest of headlines from the past few years that should show the Woodbury voter what kind of hands their district, and tax dollars, are in:

If you live in Woodbury/District 833, you’ve witnessed a pretty venal and ugly little campaign to try to separate you and your tax dollars. Pass these vids around, and let’s try not to reward this sort of thing any more.

In recent weeks, this blog, as well as the rest of the media, I’ve noted a bit of an uptick in publicized violence in the St. Paul public schools.

The Minneapolis public schools seem to of
been paying attention – and turn their best minds on to the problem of school violence.

We know this, because they have solve the problem.

The Minneapolis public schools are now a “violence free zone“.

There’s a school bonding referendum on the ballot this Tuesday; the district wants $250 million, on top of the huge bond they got two years ago, on top of all their state money.

There are campaigns, both against the bill and, naturally, for it.

Over the weekend, the Washington County Watchdog facebook page tripped upon a couple of giggly north-Suburban bobbleheads chuckling about stealing “Vote No” campaign signs – or, in one case, having her kids do it.

The Watchdog confirmed that one of the women is affiliated with/employed by the “Vote Yes” campaign.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve often thought about writing a book.  I started one in college – the draft has long since disappeared.  I write blog posts that could be expanded into a book.  And I know a couple of people who’ve written books, I could get tips and advice from them.  But every time I start, it turns into a lot of work and I am not known for my patience.

Maybe a book of short stories centered around a common theme, like “The Martian Chronicles,” self-publish on Amazon and retire on the royalties? Still too much work.  What if I crowd-sourced it?  What if Shot In The Dark readers each took one story idea and ran with it?

Story One: Chad is a 20-something White male who suffers from mental illness but won’t take his meds because he doesn’t like the way they make him feel.  When the voices in his head get too loud, he does crazy stuff that gets him arrested.  But by the time of his commitment hearing after the 72-hour hold, he’s back on his meds and coherent, his parents swear he’s gentle and kind, his ACLU lawyer argues he’s not a threat to himself or others, and the judge releases him.  Until one day when he’s off his meds, a girl in a coffee shop snubs him as a “nobody” and moments later he sees CNN talking about somebody who shot up a school who’s now famous.  The voices convince him to pursue fame by committing his own massacre.  How he plans and executes the crime . . .

Story Two:  Patricia, the mother of one of the people Chad killed, is media-savvy and politically connected.  Her incessant television appearances produce a groundswell of Right-Thinking people who convince the President to issue an Executive Order repealing the Second Amendment and appointing her Gun Czar with authority to rid the United States of privately held firearms.   How she plans and executes the seizure . . . .

Story Three: Charlie, a farmer near St. Cloud, who owns shotguns for bird hunting and rifles for deer hunting, hears about Patricia while eating breakfast at the local diner but thinks little of it until Deputy John pulls his squad car up to the farmhouse saying “I’ve gotta take your guns, Charlie, it’s the law.”  What happens next . . . .

Story Four: Dante, the owner of a recreational pharmaceuticals distribution franchise in Frogtown, sees Patricia on the television while eating lunch at White Castle and frowns.  How will he defend his territory from poachers and his profits from thieves?  How he circumvents the law . . . .

Story Five, Six, Seven – you get the idea.

Joe Doakes

Hmmm.

Writing a book via semi-crowdsourced blog posts?

It’s almost crazy enough to work…

Here’s the Washington County Watchdog, which has the Facebook thread with the Forest Lake women stealing “Vote No” signs – which is theft, suppression of free speech, and – since one of the women is involved in the “Vote Yes” campaign – must be some kind of violation of campaign laws.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be filling in for Brad Carlson live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show, I’ll be talking two solid hours of updates from the culture war.

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!