A week ago this past Monday, we wrote about the tear-squirting in Kansas, as Kansas’ state-run post-secondary schools get ready for the legal mandate to allow concealed carry on campus to take effect.

And today comes the story of a student and victim from the mass-stabbing a few weeks ago at University of California at Merced, who, after a terrible experience that included being stabbed (and waiting 20 minutes for police to arrive)(…:

…After that horrifying experience of being stabbed, Price was able to drive himself a couple of miles from the university, to Mercy Medical Center, to be treated.

Amazingly, within a couple of hours, he was able to drive himself home.

“I’m not going to get upset over one loose cannon,” said Price.

Infact, he plans to head back to the university, to get back to work.

The contractor is just thankful, he’s able to go home to his family, still puzzled over why.

“To become a university student and throw it all away like that, I don’t know why he’d want to do that,” said Price.

…undertook the sensible conclusion:

Price says he now thinks differently about having a concealed weapon.

He wishes he had one when this all unfolded.

Police chiefs and politicians may hem and haw at the idea – but the people who actually live where this crap happens know better.  A guy with a gun saves lives.  Even if it’s just their own.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Seems to me I read a similar proposal on SITD lately.

Maybe you’re inspiring a national movement!!

Joe Doakes

I’m like the “Murray the K” of gun rights.

I was tempted to fisk the NYTimes’ deeply stupid editorial – their first front-page editorial since 1920 – calling for confiscation of “assault weapons”.

But Brian Doherty at Reason already did it, and did it better.

(more…)

The inhabitants of the sleepy Mesopotamian village of Kut al Amara (or Kut for short), might have felt like strangers in their own homes on December 7th, 1915.  Situated on the banks of the Tigris river 100 miles south of Baghdad, the 6,500 residents of Kut were certainly used to people passing through, albeit usually via the river.  But the latest visitors to Kut had mostly arrived by land – well over 13,000 of them – and were starting to make themselves at home.  Trenches and bulwarks were being created overnight; tents flooded the village and surrounding river banks.

The newest guests to Kut were a collection of British and Indian troops who had last passed through the village attempting to claim Baghdad, and all of Mesopotamia, for the Crown.  Now in headlong retreat, the British and Indians had chosen to dig in and allow themselves to be surrounded by their Ottoman pursuers.  It had been the the brainchild of an arrogant British Indian Army General who preferred taking his orders from New Delhi than London, and was being executed by a British General whose claim to fame had been enduring a similar siege in Pakistan years earlier.

The strategy to conquer Mesopotamia had been ill-conceived and hastily implemented.  Now it was about to become, in the words of one British military historian, “the most abject capitulation in Britain’s military history.”

—

The Siege of Kut – many of the troops that held Kut for 147 days would never return home

Had the War Office in London gotten their way, Britain’s involvement in the so-called “Cradle of Civilization” would have ended in November of 1914.    (more…)

So the next time some anti-gun talking head says “There’ve been 355 mass shootings so far this year”, remember – the figure comes from this site, “Shootingtracker.com“.  It’s a crowd-sourced site that allows pretty much anyone to report a “mass shooting” – defined as any event where three or more people (including the shooter) get shot.

Now, the media presents this as if every incident is a spree killing – someone setting out to kill innocent people at random (Columbine, Red Lake, the DC Navy Yard et al) or as acts of terrorism (San Bernardino, Chattanooga etc).

Of course, it includes many more mundane crimes; thugs shooting into crowded bars, family murder-suicides, and many, many criminal acts gone terribly awry.

And, it seems, one act in 2015 of whose genesis we’re not remotely sure.

Check out #345.  It was the shooting in North Minneapolis on November 23.

Now, you can find Mr. Scarsella’s motives repugnant – I certainly do, if they are as alleged.  And you can note, very correctly, that if Messrs Scarsella, Macey, Gustavsson and Backman wanted to claim self-defense, waiting for the Minneapolis Police to find them was the wrong way to do it.

But they do, in fact, seem to have at least a passing claim at self-defense, not something that can be dismissed out of hand no matter how much one may wish to.

So while it may be legitimate to count it as a “mass shooting” – a mass of three or more people were shot! – lumping it in there with San Bernardino, and the Navy Yard, and Umpqua, with their perps that fully intended to kill innocent people for purposes of either media immortality or political terror, is deeply dishonest – whether on “Shootingtracker.com”‘s part, or on the media’s.

It also introduces the question:  does it include other shootings, where a citizen interrupted a mass shooting with return fire?

I’ll be looking this over in coming days.

One of the downsides of being a GOP activist and officer is that you have to get involved, even passively, in GOP inside baseball.   Ever.  For any reason.

And of course, it’s important; without a viable challenge to the DFL, Minnesota is a few downturns away from turning into California.  Or Minneapolis.

So I go to the meetings.  I vote on stuff.  I do my bit to try to help get better people elected to office; not just Republicans, but conservative Republicans who support limited government.

And I try to get as informed as I can about some of the “inside baseball” issues in the GOP; the budget deficit (how the hell…?), the collapse in the Cities, the turnout issues in the first and second ring ‘burbs…

…and of course, the Judicial Elections Committee.

That Buzzing Sound That Never Goes Away:  The JEC is an obscure fixture in the MNGOP, focusing both on endorsing judicial candidates and fighting for judicial reform.

As re the second?  The subject is a deadly combination of intensely technical and very important.   It’s intensely picayune – and absolutely vital.  The judiciary has turned into an unaccountable, opaque, lifetime sinecure in Minnesota; judges have extremely disproportionate power as a result, and the ability to make sweeping decisions with almost no accountability.  And the power extends beyond just the courtroom; the past several state redistricting processes, including the 2010 redistricting – gerrymandered enough to make Bull Connor and George Wallace sit up in the grave and say “Hey, bucko, you’re getting a little carried away, here”.  “Shall Issue” carry reform was struck down in 2004 by a judge whose home was a DFL hamster wheel and who, ignoring the fact that every state budget is a combination of omnibus bills full of unrelated amendments, struck down the law because it wasn’t closely enough related to the bill that was originally amended.

So there is a problem that needs to be solved.

There’s a lot of history to the notion of judicial endorsements, and the creation of the JEC, and its activities since it was established; I’ve written about them in the past, and I won’t rewrite it all now (search my site for references to the phrase “My brain went blank and my ass went numb”).

But it’s the JEC’s recent history that concerns me most.

Last Saturday was the GOP’s State Central Committee meeting.  I didn’t attend – but the future of the JEC was one of the subjects up for discussion.  And my butt went a little numb just reading the accounts on Twitter.

Business:  Of course, the JEC’s main claim to “fame” was the endorsement of Michelle McDonald to run for State Supreme Court.  This happened at the MNGOP State Convention in Rochester in May of 2014.  McDonald turned out to have a pending year-old DUI charge – about which the convention was not told.   We’ve written about this at some length in the past.

Let’s fast forward to last Saturday.  A series of handouts was waiting for the SCC delegates as they arrived at the event, or distributed during the convention; a friend scanned and sent them to me (the scan is included below the jump).

In it, the JEC explains the reasons for its existence – and, to be honest, does it fairly well, in places (and let’s be honest – the handout was written by logorrheacs, and you have to dig to find the good stuff.  But it’s in there).  In all my years of listening to JEC members trying to explain why judicial endorsements, and judicial reform, are good and vital, and why retention elections are bad, this is the first time even the faintest hint of a light has gone off above my head.

And so partly as a result of this handout, my previous determination to tear down the JEC, with flamethrowers if necessary, has been tempered just a bit.

I said “the JEC”.

The JEC’s membership is another story.

Twenty Octogenarians Driving A Clown Car:  If you recall – and I completely forgive you if you do not – the history of and beef with the McDonald endorsement goes a little something like this:

1. The JEC recommended Michelle McDonald – a controversial family-law lawyer – for nomination to run for the Supreme Court (SCOM).
2. At the State Convention, after the delegates had endured a 20-odd-hour endorsement battle for Senate, the JEC brought McDonald to the stage for a speech and a motion for endorsement by acclamation.  Many delegates were out – grabbing a bite, or in the bathroom, or stretching their legs after the endless Senate battle – and many that were in the room reported feeling bum-rushed – but the motion for acclamation passed, and McDonald was endorsed.
3. The following week, the media reported that McDonald had a pending DUI charge awaiting trial.
4. Reports emerged that the JEC had been aware of this charge, but had voted to nominate McDonald anyway, and had voted to not inform the delegates, including blocking an attempt to issue a minority report to the convention that would have brought up the legal issues for the delegates’ consideration.
5. McDonald and the MNGOP brass spent the next five months fighting each other, under a blazing media spotlight, rarely managing or bothering to engage the DFL’s candidate, Darth Lillehaug, on any level.
6. McDonald went on to lose the election against Lillehaug.  According to some reports, her campaign raised less that $1,000, and spent about $8,000.

The handouts give a couple of insights into the JEC’s performance – or “performance” – at the 2014 State convention, in the first two pages (the pink ones, whose order is reversed; page 2 is actually page 1).   It’s also full of opinion-driven weasel words – “the chair appeared…”, “in the committee’s opinion, the chair…” and the like.

There are two quotes from the handout, though, that display…something about the JEC’s opinion of itself; whether that something is arrogance, incompetence or malfeasance, I’m not sure and I’ll leave it to better judges than I.

It should be noted that the purpose of any endorsing committee is to spare the convention the task of sorting through a candidate’s personal life.  the job of any endorsing committee is to do the work in confidence and present a yes or no to the convention.  Committees focus on a candidate’s message, their willingness to campaign hard and their ability appeal (sic) to voters.  The idea that the Judicial Election Committee (or any other nominating committee) should air a candidate’s personal information to the convention is badly misinformed.

Exactly what a nominating committee is supposed to do is a subject worthy of discussion. And the passage may be right; a nominating committee should concern itself with competence and electability.

But a legal proceeding that is guaranteed to provoke a media feeding frenzy is both not “personal information” – it’s a public record, available online from the courts – and of direct impact to the candidate’s electability.

So this quote – along with the rest of the information in the handout, brings up three possibilities:

1. The majority of the JEC genuinely believed that an arrest record is “personal information” that was nobody’s business.  If this was the case, then we’re dealing with some stupid people.  Arrest records are public!  Public!  Public!  Anyone who thought this was “personal information”, and believed that the media and DFL would treat it that way, needs to be publicly (rhetorically) horsewhipped.
2. They knew about the arrest record, but figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since McDonald assured them the charge was BS:   You’ll note how many media figured led with the whole “Michelle McDonald is innocent until proven guilty, and gosh, she looks like she has a strong case” tack, right?  Somewhere less than zero?  Part of a nominations commission’s job is to try, as far as possible, to prevent media poo-storms like…the one we had.
3. The JEC figured the news would be a problem, but wanted to jam McDonald down anyway, leading a supermajority to vote against the issuance of a minority report.   This is the worst kind of malfeasance.

We also see in another quote that the JEC is wallowing in either wishful thinking or an arrogant desire to bullshit the rest of the party:

…in spite of the flap over a now resolved (not guilty) DWI case, Michelle McDonald for Supreme Court won 46.54% of the vote.  This is higher than Johnson, McFadden, Severson, Gilbert and Newman – all the other MNGOP endorsed candidates

How stupid do these people think the rest of the party is?

The DWI is “now resolved” – but it wasn’t at election time.  And the media certainly didn’t harp on “innocence until proven guilty”.

As to her turnout?  As we pointed out the first time the JEC tried to use this chanting point to gull the gullible, it was BS.  McDonald got 46% against Lillehaug, it’s true – but John Hancock got 42% against Mimi Wright, and virtually every contested judicial race in the state got 35-40%.  McDonald outscored random, obstinate, uninformed noise by 4-6%. And while it’s possible she outperformed “background noise” due to her brilliant campaign, it’s also possible that a few thousand shooters voted against Darth Lillehaug, and would have no matter who was nominated.

My Conclusion, For Those Who Care?:  The JEC exists for good reason.  Minnesota’s judicial system needs changes, and the GOP needs to help drive those changes.

But most of its members need to go.  Decency would involve resignations of the sitting membership for their malfeasance, or at least stupidity, in the McDonald flap.   The JEC process is almost completely opaque to delegates, and even officers at the BPOU and Congressional District level.   I’m an officer, and I have no idea how Judicial Districts elect officers and do business.  It’s not just me.

The JEC, in my opinion, is a nook and cranny of the GOP that was built by, and is controlled by, a group of people who have turned it into their little political playground.  This doesn’t serve the mission that the JEC has set out for itself.

Just my opinion.  But I’m not alone.

As we’ll see, I’m sure, come the next State Convention.

Telling Tangent: Want to know something ironic?  I might well have voted for McDonald even with the pending DUI charge, had the JEC tried a little honesty, and had McDonald spent more time tackling Darth Lillehaug than Keith Downey.  But if I’d known about her involvement in the Grazzini-Rucki custody battle, I’d have voted for Charles Manson before I’d vote for McDonald.   If McDonald was involved with kidnapping and brainwashing a couple of kids against their custodial father, she deserves much worse than losing an election.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everything Republicans said about Obamacare has come true.  Now, even the cheerleaders realize it.

“We did not believe it would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe,” he added.

Translated: “porous” means “the Obamacare net caught only sick people because the healthy ones were allowed to wriggle out through various Executive Orders.”

Further translated: “Obama lied to us; he promised we could base premiums on a mix of young healthy people with old sick ones, then he threw us under the bus by letting the young healthy people out to save his re-election.”

Still further translated: “I believed Obama.  I was an idiot.”

Yep.  Republicans knew it six years ago.  Glad we could clear that up.

Joe Doakes

Being right is fun.

Being right after a good chunk of our economy and healthcare system has been botched like a Salvadoran tummy-tuck?  Not so fun.

We apparently don’t have Heather Martens to kick around anymore!

As carry permit applications, pre-purchase background checks, and gun and ammo sales roar to new all-time records, the NRA is being crushed with new and renewing members.

Scarcely a peep in the media (especially about the membership).

But one Democrat politician and “NRA member” “quits” – and the media is lined up out the door.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d wager good money that:

1. He was an “NRA member” for the same reason I “joined the teachers union” when I taught a semester at Metro State, and
2. Come his next campaign, he’s going to have at least one pic in his campaign lit, decked out in hunting camo with a duck gun.

But I won’t blame anyone for not taking any action on that bet.

How do you sign up for the Debate Party with Geno and the Count, with cigars and adult beverages, at the legendary Mancave?  Right here, baby!

Here’s the Legislative Evaluation Assembly.

And of course, ♫ today’s music playlist.

That figure that the media and the anti-gun chanting-point-bots are jabbering about – where there’ve ostensibly been 355 “mass shootings” so far this year?

Yeah, it’s BS.

(more…)

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

Today on the show, we’ll be talking – you guessed it – San Bernardino.  Also…:

• I’ll be talking with John Augustine of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly about the upcoming session.
• I’ll be talking with Geno and The Count about their upcoming debate night party.

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 can’t remember the band that was playing the first time I went to the First Avenue, in Minneapolis, when I first moved here in 1985 – although I have some fairly clear memories of my first impressions of the bar itself.    It was probably one of any number of punk bar bands that were vying to be “The Next Replacements” – not much unlike the band I’d be starting myself in future months.

But I do remember clearly the first concert I went to: October 15, 1986 – Richard Thompson.   It was on tour with this band…:

…and it was on my list of my top three concerts, ever.

I also remember the last concert I saw at the First Avenue (and the last club gig I attended at all, until I saw Katrina “and the Waves” Leskanich last spring at the Amsterdam); yep, it was Richard Thompson, in September of 1997.  There were two other gigs – ’88 and ’90 – in between.

And so when I got a late tip that Thompson was coming to town this past Wednesday, I had to check it out.

It was a chilly night in downtown Minneapolis – which, in my memory, was always what it felt like on concert nights in Minneapolis when I was in my 20s:

7th Street, Wednesday night.

The, er, disconcerting part?  The first time I saw Thompson, the average age in the audience was 25-40.  On Wednesday, it was more like 50-60…:

…although there were a gratifying share of twentysomethings in the house.   Upside?  While concerts with bands catering to twentysomethings routinely find themselves getting patted down or run through metal detectors, security was pretty irrelevant at the Thompson gig.

The opening act – Richard Thompson, doing a solo acoustic set – was predictably amazing.  And when I say “amazing”, it’s not just an idle conversational space-filler; I’m not a bad guitar player, but every time I see Thompson, I say that very quietly, and go home afterward and ponder starting over on the instrument from scatch, just to try to get it right.

How amazing?   I’m one of tens of thousands of guitarists who’ve tangled their fingers into bloody spaghetti trying to conquer his most famous acoustic tune, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, which see:

That was a fairly simple rendition, by the way.   He closed his solo set with the song – and he’s taken up jamming on the bass part, throwing in a few dramatic, swooping descents, all the while picking the high part.

All the while singing the song.   I can barely think the three things at the same time, much less pull them off on the guitar.

No, I can’t describe it any better.

After the acoustic set, the Richard Thompson Electric Trio – drummer David Jerome and bassist Michael Faraday (or so it sounded from the stage – I didn’t catch his name, and can’t find a reference to him online) – took over.

This being the first time I’d seen Thompson live in almost 18 years, it was a little odd seeing him without some permutation of the band he’d been touring with since the seventies; the first four times I saw him, the band was some combination of Dave Mattacks on drums, Dave Pegg or Danny Thompson on bass, Pete Zorn/Clive Gregson/Christine Collister on guitars, keyboards, backup vocals and (with Zorn) sax.  That group of musicians was pretty much Thompson’s comfort zone for many years.

So the new band was a switch; Faraday (?) is a very solid, steady bass player – a human low-frequency metronome through the often-frenetic modulations in Thompson’s music.

Jerome, on the other hand, is a trip.  Formerly with Better than Ezra as well as a dizzying range of session work with everyone from KD Lang and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama to the Toadies and John Cale, he’s also been Thompson’s go to drummer since 2002’s Mock Tudor album.   Live, with an extremely stripped down kit, and plenty of room to stretch out in the power trio format, he’s every bit as eclectic and all over the map as Thompson himself – sort of an improvisational jazz drummer in an Brit folk-rock world.

Which often lends the band a feeling that everything could spin out of control, like driving too fast along a cliffside road.  And yet, it never does.

The show was notably light on older material – which makes sense; how does someone who’s never had a “great hit” do a greatest hits tour?

Still, an artist like Thompson, with a body of work going back almost fifty years, could easily fill two hours with stuff that’d keep a crowd of long-time fans (like yours truly) happy without doing anything after 1990.

But with a few exceptions – “Valerie” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” from the solo set, and “For Shame of Doing Wrong”, “Wall of Death”, “Did She Jump (Or Was She Pushed)” and a madcap rave-up of “Tear-Stained Letter” with the band, most of the show was stuff from this past decade, mostly the last few albums.

And I could scarcely be happier.  While it’d be fun to curl up with songs from I Want To See The Bright Lights or Shoot Out The Lights or Across A Crowded Room would be fun and comfortable, that’d make a Thompson tour just another Rolling Stones tour, without the piles and piles of money.  If you’re not in it for the megabucks (not that Thompson doesn’t earn a respectable living as a touring cult favorite with a decent-sized fanatical following), I can see where staying creative can get pretty vital.

I’ll take a run at one highlight; the song “Guitar Heroes”, which Thompson dedicated with a wink and a nod to “Steve Vai and Joe Satriani”.  The song has nothing to do with either of them; the song jumps from its own (minor-key rockabilly) theme into stylized passages from “Melodie au Crepuscule” by Django Reinhardt, “Caravan” by Duke Ellington (with Juan Tizol on guitar), “Brenda Lee” by Chuck Berry, “Susie Q” (the pre-Creedence version) “F.B.I.” by the Shadows.

But it’s hard to pick a highlight; like all Thompson shows, I spent most of the evening, slack-jawed, realizing that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to play a guitar like that.

Which, I guess, is comforting in its own way.  After three and a half decades, five shows, a couple dozen albums, a marriage, three kids and three careers, at least that’s stayed a constant.

Look for a refund, if you bought tickets.

RIP, Scott Weiland, who apparently passed away in Bloomington last night.

We’ll always have 1995:

The Anoka County Sheriff’s office has announced, to some fanfare, that they are lowering the fee for carry permits from $75 to $10 for people on active duty in the military.

Which, on the one hand, is great.

But then I had two thoughts:

Rights:  I support our military – especially their right to not be as undefended as a pack of hamsters when not covered by Rules of Engagement overseas.

But are they more entitled to their civil rights and liberties than the rest of us?  Should government be deciding which citizens have easier access to their Second Amendment rights, any moreso than one’s First, Fourth, Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment rights?

This is, in a way, a throwback to the bad old days, pre-2003, when a law-abiding citizens’a access to their Second Amendment rights – their ability to get a carry permit – was directly related to their clout and access to local government officials. It’s more benign, of course – it’s the same shall-issue policy once the fee is out of the way – but $10 is easier to cover than $75, no matter who you are.

That’s the danger when government gets into the business of doling out our freedoms to us instead of us doling its power out to it; it starts picking winners and losers.  And that’s what this is, even if we generally support this particular group of winners.

The Sheriff’s Nest Egg:  Sheriffs charge a wide range of fees around the state; Ramsey County is up around $100, along with most of the other Metro counties, if I recall correctly; others are much cheaper.

But the fee covers the cost of a department employee taking an application (which the applicant fills out), filing it, and at some point entering the applicant’s data into one or more databases to see if there’s a disqualifying hit.  Then the state prints and mails a card.

What’s the actual cost of this process, in terms of government time and materials?  Estimates vary – law enforcement is pretty tight-lipped about it – but it’s somewhere between $5 and $20.  And I’m no expert, but I’d say Anoka County has just given us a “tell” about the actual cost.

Which means plenty of Minnesota counties are putting away huge nest eggs of carry permit application fee money.   It’s become a tax on law-abiding citizens exercising their tights – not much different than the poll taxes that got ruled out of existence decades ago.

Congrats, Anoka County servicepeople, and enjoy your new benefit in good health.

But think about it, everyone.

Joe Doakes from Como Park – who, let the record show, is an attorney – emails:

I don’t understand Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s legal analysis in charging the BLM shooter with assault with a deadly weapon.

When Black people protest, it’s a Constitutionally protected right.  If White people counter-protest, it should be just as protected, right?

Yes, I know, the White people said they were going to stir up trouble.  They know somebody who owns a Confederal flag.  They talked trash on video.  That’s bad manners, agreed.  But filming Black protestors and even calling them names is no less protected speech than burning a cross in somebody’s yard and we know that’s constitutional, decided decades ago in RAV v. St. Paul.  So going to the protest should be good.

If the White guys were racially offensive in implementing their counter-protest, does that negate the shooters self-defense claim?  The standard is:

1. Did not initiate the physical conflict, must be a reluctant participant.
2. Attempted to retreat by running away
3. Reasonably believed they were about to suffer great bodily harm at the hands of an enraged mob
4. Used reasonable force to repel the attack by firing a few rounds, only one of which injured anybody

I’m sure the prosecutor and the media will portray the White men as the aggressors, not as reluctant participants.  But that doesn’t sound right to me.  If you and I are having a heated discussion, the guy who throws the first punch is the aggressor, regardless how annoying the words are.

There might be such a thing as “fighting words” to justify a quick punch.  But there’s no such thing as “chasing-down-an-alley” words to justify a mob beating.  The Black mob initiated the threat of physical violence, the White men attempted to retreat and used reasonable force as a last resort.  I would think the shooter has a pretty good case for self-defense.  I would expect Mike Freeeman to see that.  I therefore conclude the assault charge is grandstanding to pacify the same mob that initiated the violence.  That’s not a good long-term strategy for maintaining public order.

Joe Doakes

“Progressive” politics is always a matter of balancing respective mobs of constituents, usually against each other.

The world is a constant churn of change; from style and music to mores and standards, nothing stays the same.

With one exception:  Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, ten years after saying “screw ’em” when four US contractors were slaughtered in Fallujah, is still a loathsome, wretched human being.

I’ve heard The Daily Kos called the cesspool of American media.  It’s half right.  The Daily Kos blog is the cesspool.  Markos Moulitsas and his contributors, and most of his readers, are the cess.

I’ve been offline for a bit, so I guess I’m just catching up, here.

My condolences to the victims of yesterday’s episode of workplace violence in San Bernardino.

Clearly, the avalanche of white-supremacist violence that the left, media and Administration (pardon the redundancy), and especially against the Planned Parenthood clinic just two miles away from the event, in our climate-change-afflicted nation, have been warning us about is coming rapidly to pass.

The real tragedy is this: if California merely banned magazines larger than ten rounds, as well as a much wider range of “assault weapons” than Federal law currently addresses, and instituted much more intrusive background checks than the rest of the country, none of this would have happened.

We can still be thankful that none of the victims, being in a “gun-free” government building, were able to resist, or who knows how bad it could have gotten?

UPDATE:  Oh.

A regular reader emails:

Gloria Steinem has a new book out. Someone told me about it, saying he wants to read it because it is about her life as a child, traveling with her father. I looked up the review of it and decided it would not be mainly about her life as a child, traveling with her father. It is more likely the same old grating antiquated feminist thoughts that she always spews. The review mentions that she touts ideas for education reform, a shift from competitive classrooms to more co-opting classroom learning. I scratch my head at that, since I think that the successful Gloria Steinem probably credits her own competitive nature more than any partnerships with people for her own success.

But, it also got me thinking about the Republican candidates, their diversity, and the language that Republican voters use when talking about the candidates versus the Democratic candidates and the language used when talking about them. In 2008, Democrats were focused on whether they’d have the first African American president or first woman president. That was basically what Obama and Clinton were reduced to. When Sarah Palin became the VP nominee, Steinem focused again on the candidate’s gender, saying that she was a win for feminism, but not the right woman. On the other hand, today’s Republican candidates are talked about in terms of their leadership skills, their experiences, their ideas. Gender and race play a minor role, at least when I talk to Republican voters. Which is how it should be. As a woman, I know when I’ve competed and won because of my skills and when I’ve won because I was a token. It is much more humiliating to win as a token than to fail because of lack of skills. The idea of taking competitiveness out of the classrooms is utterly frightening. How would children develop self worth? Develop skills to be marketable in jobs?

I did an Internet search for Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton and found more reasons not to read Steinem’s latest book.   Compare that rhetoric with what Carly Fiorina said in 2002 about labeling people by gender.

Obviously, the liberal Slate writer doesn’t agree with Steinem on this particular issue, but I think that the contrasting level of maturity seen between Steinem and Fiorina here epitomizes the general level of maturity seen in the Democrat voter versus the Republican voter.

I heard Steinem on “Fresh Air” a few weeks back, plugging the book – and was struck by how the author, who must be in her mid to late seventies, still sounded like a cranky junior high kid.

Russia bars George Soros’ “Open Society Project” from Russia.

A Berg Administration would recognize them as a bigger long-term danger to this country than ISIS or Al Quaeda.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Pacific Island cargo cultists, who believe that if they create the shape of an airplane, other airplanes will come, and American GIs will resume bringing them cigarettes and chocolate and good steel knives.

Liberals think if they create the shape of a ballot box – the bigger the better – democracy will come and it will create a prosperous society that can afford cigarettes, chocolate and good steel knives.  But Cuba has elections and so does North Korea, neither of which are democracies or prosperous.  And if Liberals get their way with voter ID laws, neither will America.

Joe Doakes

Much of liberalism – really, any politics designed to boil the universe down to simple changes and slogans and wants and needs – basically is the equivalent

UPDATE:  As always we follow the 24 hour rule here in SITD.

But – and I’m strictly speculating here – am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that the killer or killers (news reporters are conflicted on that point) didn’t stick around to go out in the usual blaze of media glory, but shot up the meeting and drove away in a “black SUV?”

Another mass shooting in California.

That is to say, a state that has every restriction that gun owners want (or admit to wanting so far):  magazine limits, background checks on private sales, the works.

A state that does its best to prevent a “good guy” from getting a gun.

How could this possibly be?

Watch for the media and the “President” to try not to waste the crisis – and for a lot of lies from both.  And above all, remember the 24 hour rule with media coverage.

Some years ago, an anti-gun group published a “study” showing that the rate of gun deaths was higher in red, square, stereotypically conservative flyover states where guns were plentiful and available to the law-abiding.

Of course, it’s a misleading point – in keeping with the gun control dictum to “Lie First, Lie Last, Lie Always”.  The vast majority of gun deaths are suicides – and this is especially true in the rural west, as a disproportionate number of people, usually older, male, depressed, often very ill, decide to check out via the most reliable means they have available, their firearms.  It’s tragic; it’s also not the same as murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape, aggravated assault or other violent crimes committed against others.   And it doesn’t take many suicides in a thinly-populated rural western county to send that per capita death rate soaring.

But no mind; fake as it is, this particular narrative made the usual rounds:

• Through the various far-left blogs that pretty much exist to recite the left’s chanting points
• To the various gun grabber groups, whose only real source of “information” is the chanting points they’re fed by their superiors in the “progressive” food chain
• And finally, mainstream “news” organizations.

And so – barely a decade after having been chastened to a fine sheen for using fraudulent sources, CBS News is still in the business of mindlessly parroting fake chanting points.

…when people were concerned about constant drumbeats of negativity creating “climates of hate?“

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

He claims to have God-like powers and therefore is entitled to do whatever he wants to do.

But he doesn’t actually have any powers; it’s all billowing smoke and scornful talk.

But people Believe he has the powers, so they let him get away with doing whatever he wants to do, just as if he actually did have the powers.

Until Toto pulls back the curtain; then, the fraud is revealed.

We need Toto around here.  The sooner the better.

Joe Doakes

The big difference?  The Wizard of Oz protested the truth of his powers until he couldn’t anymore.  Obama seems to have checked out even as the little yappy dogs swarm over his administraiton.