Y’know, if only we had universal background checks, perhaps guns wouldn’t get onto “the street” like this:
That’s right – if we can only get law-abiding citizens to submit to proctological exams, that’ll solve it.
I’ll be at Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day on Thursday – the more of you show up, the bigger the message we send.
I’ll also be at the Debate Party at B52 Burgers and Brew on Thursday evening – and I’d really like to see you there.
Check out the tickets for the AM1280 The Patriot 15th Birthday party.
And here’s Katie Kieffer’s book, Let Me Be Clear.
Finally – ♫ here’s today’s playlist.
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!
We’ll be talking about the caucuses, the Trump thing, and much more!
We’ll also be giving away four-packs of tickets to the AM1280 The Patriot Birthday Bash.
Today on the show,
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
Just a brief diversion from politics today.
Today would have been the 80th birthday of James “Jimmy” Clark, perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time.
A big claim? Perhaps. There are eight drivers who’ve won more than Clarks’ 25 F1 contests; there are others who’ve won more than his two F1 World Championship titles. Nobody may ever dominate the sport like Michael Schumacher did in the 2000s.
Clark in his ’67 Lotus/Cosworth – one of the great engine-chassis combinations in F1 history.
But Clark was notable for a couple of things. First, he was one of the most prominent racers at a time when an F1 race wasn’t a whole lot safer than flying a bombing mission in World War 2. In Clark’s second F1 race, the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, two drivers were killed. Clark was also involved in one of the most horrific accidents in modern F1 history; at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix at Monza – with its steeply banked curves that were the inspiration for the Hot Wheels tracks you may remember from your childhood – German driver Wolfgang Von Trips tangled with Clark in a turn and veered off the track, killing Trips and fifteen spectators. So surviving long enough to win a significant number of races, much less multiple championships, was no mean feat.
It only seems like Crosstown during rush hour. Ugly crashes like these – in the days before rupture-resistant fuel tanks and full roll cages – were pretty normal fifty years ago.
Second: Clark excelled in just about every kind of racing car imaginable: in addition to being the premiere F1 driver of his era, he won the ’64 British Touring Car championships, was a competitive Rally driver, placed in the money at Le Mans twice out of three attempts, and even drove in a NASCAR race (the 1967 American 500 at Rockingham). He competed several times at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in an Aston Martin DBR1:
Clark in his Le Mans Aston Martin DBR1.
And, most notably, he competed in five Indy 500s; in ’64 and ’66, the cars crapped out in the first 40 laps (they were British cars, after all). In the other three – ’63, ’65 and ’67 – he never finished below 2nd place. He came within a whisker of winning in ’63, his rookie race, but for a controversial decision not to black-flag Parnelli Jones’s car, which was gushing oil. He earned “Rookie of the Year” in perhaps the most specactular rookie turn in Brickyard history.
After going out with suspension failure in ’64, he came back and won in ’65, leading in 190 out of 200 laps – the first foreign-born driver to win the Memorial Day Classic since the 1910s.
Clark’s 1965 Lotus 38 – the car with which he won the ’65 Indy contest. It looks like a glorified go-kart – don’t you love that single roll bar that doesn’t even come up over the driver’s head? But this was the first car to finish the 500 miles at an average of greater than 150mph.
And while many drivers have surpassed his total wins, total points and total championships records, he holds one that can only be tied – he won 100% of the possible championship points in ’63 and ’65 (tying Alberto Ascari’s record) – and two that may he never be beaten (he held the lead in nearly 72% of the laps he raced in ’63, and he holds eight “Grand Slams” – races where he held the pole position, won the race, and led the entire race).
How talented was he? Most F1 drivers are as persnickety about their cars’ setups as three-star chefs are about their kitchens. Clark was famous for jumping into cars pretty much as-is, running a few laps, and molding his style to the car’s setup, and never really changing anything. And going on to win.
Aside from talent, the big draw with Clark – for me, at least – was that he spent pretty much his entire F1 and Indy career with one team; Lotus.
And Lotus built the most beautiful F1 cars ever. Bar none. Certainly compared to today’s F1 cars, which are engineering marvels that, unthinkably in ’60s terms, rarely kill their drivers, but look (and sound) like vacuum cleaners.
A moment of silence, please.
It was a time when British engineering may have been troublesome to keep running – but dammit, it looked good! Whether it was fictional spy cars…:
You knew it was coming.
or tanks,
A British “Chieftain” tank, which served from the sixties into the early 2000s. It may have been marginally more reliable than an E-series Jaguar – but it was what a tank should look like. Modern tanks, with their squared-off Chobham armor may run and shoot rings around the Chieftan – but the Chieftain’s design says “Tank. James Tank”.
or aircraft,
A Bristol Buccaneer of the Royal Navy. That is one beautiful plane – one of many the Brits built, starting with the Spitfire, and ending about the time the Brits stopped building their own aircraft. I need to do a series on British design someday.
or prestige roadsters,
An E-series Jaguar. In its natural state – sitting still.
Clark’s dominance coincided with the great, and final (?), age of British engineering dominance.
Minneapolis and St. Paul schools continue to fail.
Hundreds of school districts in the state are not making significant progress in closing achievement gaps, including the state’s largest urban districts, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
All Minnesota school districts and charter schools are required to improve reading and math test scores, boost graduation rates and cut achievement gaps for all students, under a state law passed in 2013.
But in its first progress report, the Minnesota Department of Education says that many are not meeting their targets.
If they do not meet their goals by the 2017-18 school year, some of their state funding could be in jeopardy.
(Not to worry. They’ll find a way to keep the parts of the machine that matter – the parts that pay dues back to Education Minnesota and thence the DFL – funded one way or another).
In the meantime, the Minnesota media is parroting the schools’ line that graduation rates are “rising”, albeit slowly. This, a year after they rapturously reported a big jump.
Unmentioned; we got a big jump after Minnesota dropped its graduation testing. So of course we had a big jump one year, followed by a trickle of “improvement” since then.
In unrelated news that’s probably related? They also lowered the standards to get a GED. So that’s looking better now, too!
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
It occurs to me that the Obama administration may be quietly supporting a Final Solution to global warming.
World population increased from 2 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today. All those extra people exhaling carbon dioxide, raising cattle that produce methane flatulence, heating their homes with natural gas, driving cars, charging their iPhones with electricity generated from burning coal . . . they all contribute to global warming. Hey, Liberals are right, global warming IS produced by mankind: the world simply has too many people emitting too much carbon.
It wouldn’t, if we could reduce world population back to 1950 levels. But how would we do it in a politically acceptable way? No Blood For Oil is still a favorite Liberal hymn.
If we support policies that undermine world-wide oil prices, the economy will collapse in oil-producing countries, leading to mass starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.
If we release terrorists from Gitmo and also foment insurrection in Arab countries, civil war will break out leading to bloodshed, disease and starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.
If we unleash the Ebola virus in Africa and the Zika virus in South America and warn women not to get pregnant for three years, we reduce the birth rate below replacement level, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.
If we let felons out of prison and decline to prosecute killers based on color, thousands will die in inner cities, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for wealthier Americans.
Europe is getting ready to eliminate millions of asylum seekers. North Korea is making noises – maybe a major war on that peninsula will draw in some neighbors to die fighting? And how are things between India and Pakistan right now, any chance they might massacre a few millions of each other’s citizens for us?
Genocide could turn out to be nicely guilt-free, as it’s not a choice, it’s a necessity to survive global warming. Settled science, doncha know? Maybe President Obama really will halt the rise of the oceans and begin the heal the planet. Boy, would I have egg on my face.
Joe Doakes
Omelette/eggs. Just saying.
I missed covering this the other day. AFSCME’s push to vacuum up money from Minnesota daycare providers got rebuffed in a landslide so decisive, that even the government unions – who normally clap their jaws onto any hint of graft like a pitbull – have given it up:
AFSCME organizers declined interviews on Tuesday but issued a statement saying they were disappointed, but that they wouldn’t pursue another union election before the law expires in 2017.
Upside? Maybe the good guys/gals can get some decent sleep during the next session:
Jennifer Parrish, a Rochester child-care provider and a leader of the Coalition of Union Free Providers, said the results of the vote weren’t surprising.
“We know that over the 10 years that we’ve been working on this that child-care providers are hands down overwhelmingly opposed to this. They were waiting by their mailboxes just so they could have an opportunity to vote no,” she said. “Family child-care providers are small business owners. … We set our own rates, we create our own working conditions — all the things that unions typically negotiate for, we determine for ourselves.”
The union would have negotiated public policy issues that “we can work for through our associations without having to pay high union dues,” she said.
Five will get you ten the DFL and Governor Flint-Smith Dayton are upset because they already spent the $2 million a year the jamdown was going to bring the DFL.
Barack Obama got swept into office on a wave of people seeking “hope” and demanding “change”.
Few could articulate the change they were hoping for – or, rather, there were tens of millions of different changes being hoped for – but by jinky, they were gonna get it.
It’s hardly arguable that most of the changes were bad; more Americans have healthcare than before, but they can afford it less.
And against that, the accusation is that the GOP did nothing – which is, of course, the impetus for much of Donald Trump’s popularity.
As Kevin Williamson points out, it’s not true – but you need to have an attention span to see it (emphasis added)
Having been elevated in the 2010 elections and fortified in subsequent elections, congressional Republicans have made a little bit of progress on the deficit, which was reduced from 8.7 percent of GDP in 2010 to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2015. In 2007, before the credit crisis and the subsequent recession, it had been about 1.1 percent of GDP — too high for the liking of many deficit hawks, but arguably manageable.
Arguably manageable – and at least moving in the right direction.
Another way to look at the spending problem is deficit compared to revenue, i.e., how much we’re borrowing to finance spending vs. how much we’re taking in. This gives you an idea of what the “stretch” is, what we’d need to cover in additional taxes or reduce through spending cuts to bring expenditures in line with income. In 2010, the deficit was 60 percent of revenue ($1.29 trillion deficit vs. $2.16 trillion revenue), whereas in 2015 the deficit was 13 percent of revenue ($439 billion deficit vs. $3.25 trillion revenue).
The moral of the story?
For those of you who habitually ask what it is that congressional Republicans have accomplished, that’s it: Despite having Barack Obama in the White House and a public that clamored for more benefits and lower taxes, the deficit has been reduced substantially in absolute terms, relative to GDP, relative to the federal budget, and relative to revenue, since the height of Democratic power under the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate.
A triumvirate that, Williamson points out, Trump funded.
Could and should the GOP majorities have done more? Perhaps. Changing the course of government is slow, unless you control the entire shootin’ match (like Obama did from ’09 through ’10). That’s intentional; there was a time when conservatives, if nobody else, knew that government was supposed to be slow.
(Which is the biggest reason Obama’s overreaches on immigration, among other topics, are so very dangerous).
Oberlin College – which is sort of the UC Berkeley of small private schools, the school that spawned Lena Dunham, the place where the affirmative checklist for student sex was invented, which has led the academic world in “trigger warning” R&D, a place that makes Carlton or Macalester look like Hillsdale – has been on the “dodgy” list for it’s weaselly approach to free speech on campus.
But it’s nice to know they know where to draw the line, isn’t it?
After weeks of blaming Republican presidental candidates for the burglary of a mosque on East Lake Street in Minneapolis, which drew CAIR and Governor Flint-Smith Dayton to exploit the incident…
…it turns out Republicans had nothing to do with it.
But do you suppose we’ll get an apology?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Obama is taking credit for full employment. The economy is roaring. The unemployment rate is under 5%. The recession is over.
Or is it? The BLS says we didn’t gain 195,000 jobs, we lost 665,000 jobs. So are those people unemployed? Turns out, it depends on what the meaning of “unemployed” is. We’re back in Clinton-land.
The red line is U3 – people who are unemployed and have looked for work within the past four weeks.
The grey line is U6 – people who are unemployed and have looked for work within the past year.
The blue line is an estimate of people who are unemployed and have not looked for work within the past year because there’s no point – there are no jobs for people with their education and experience. They’ve given up hope.
Meanwhile, this Federal Reserve study concludes at least some of the unemployment is caused by immigrants. President Obama’s most recent plan would exacerbate the problem.
What it tells me is: all the numbers are lies. The government agencies lie to us, they lie to each other, they lie to the media. It’s like the old Soviet Union claiming record harvests as they beg the UN for food because harvests were so bad.
I don’t think this is the Full Employment that we were looking for.
Joe Doakes
Honesty has fewer opportunities for graft.
There’s an old parable; I want to say it’s Russian, since it sounds like it’s part of the Russian character. I don’t know.
But it’s a good parable. There once was a swamp full of frogs. The frogs in a swamp were happy; plenty of slime to jump through, plenty of bugs to eat.
But something was missing. So they asked “why can’t we have a king?”
And presently, a king was sent to them; a stork.
Storks, of course, eat frogs.
The moral: be careful what you wish for.
Along those lines, a longtime friend of the blog writes:
I have a friend here at work who for years has said our problem is that we elect politicians. Well, now he belly-aches because he thinks a Trump presidency is a bad idea. Unless there is a serious change, soon, he’s going to get exactly what he said he wanted, originally — in nominee-form, anyway.
Jesse Ventura II
I like to think that’s why Minnesota bucked the Trump wave last night; we’ve been through this before.
…that a Trump presidency would be a total loss, there’s always this.
Of course, I believe all those useless mouths will walk away from their federal pensions abojt the time Rosie O’Donnell moves to Canada.
But a guy can dream.
It occurs to me – even though we’ve got all the internet we want these days, I’ve never gone out and looked up a lot of the people I used to know in the radio business.
Of course, from my first, probably most “famous” gig in Twin Cities radio – KSTP, thirty years ago – some of them are all too easy. Don Vogel died over twenty years ago; John MacDougal, not long after that. Cathy Wurzer has been part of the furniture at MPR for almost as long. Mark Boyle has been the voice of the Indiana Pacers for a quarter century now; his sports sidedkick Bruce Gordon is a communications guy with the State of Minnesota.
But of the people who were on the air, the one I get asked about the most is Geoff Charles. The self-styled former-marine / former hippie and the only person in American media who’s farther out than Art Bell, who was just as mercurial and enigmatic in person as he was on the air (and one of the genuinely nicest people I’ve ever met in the racket, once I started working for him) is…
…utterly, counterintuitively, a long-time fixture in radio in Providence, Rhode Island.
And the idea of G Charles staying anywhere that long is a psychic acid trip in its own right.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Thank God they were wearing the appropriate shirts.
Joe Doakes
But was privilege involved?
I’m going to the caucuses tonight.
Who am I going to caucus for? Well, not Trump. I think he’s an epic fraud who will betray the conservatives who’ve lined up behind him. He’s like an executive brand David Souter, via Vince McMahon.
And I won’t be caucusing for Kasich – who I think is a solid VP candidate – or Carson, who I believe is way out of his depth, and who needs to run for Mayor of Detroit, where he’ll do a lot more good than he’s doing now.
My short list – Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal – are both obviously out of the picture. So it’s down to Cruz or Rubio for me.
Who’s it gonna be?
Not sure. Partly because I am, genuinely, not sure. And partly because the vitriol inside the party has gotten so very, very mindless and pointless. Dennis Prager writes about it – and it’s something every Republican, and especially every conservative, should read before they go to the caucuses:
So this is where we stand today: Many anti-Rubio Republicans regard Rubio as a traitor on the immigration issue and therefore have contempt for his supporters. Many anti-Cruz Republicans regard Cruz as an extremist conservative who is, moreover, a misanthrope, and therefore have contempt for his supporters. And many anti-Trump Republicans – perhaps most – regard Trump as a dangerous fraud, and therefore view his supporters with contempt.
Needless to say, with these attitudes, there is little chance any Republican can win.
So, then, despite eight years of failure under a Democratic president, and with Hillary Clinton — widely regarded as a completely untrustworthy woman who has put pursuit of money and power above the interests of her country — as the Democratic candidate, Republicans will still lose. And Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.
One observation I made of Ron Paul supporters in 2008 and 2012 – that they seemed to be personality cultists, who believed not only was Paul the only valid choice, but that any other choice was no better in any way than a Democrat, or nobody at all – has metastasized across much of the GOP body politic this cycle.
And so while the “passion index” favors the GOP by landslide proportions – it is, at this point, almost entirely aimed at other Republicans, rather than at the doddering would-be Hugo Chavez or cynical, calculating would-be Eva Peron who, some need to be reminded, actually would be worse for the country than Rubio, Cruz or even Trump.
So if Trump wins the nomination? I’ll vote for him – not because I think he’ll be a good president, not because I think he’s going to hold to his promises (not even on immigration), and not even because I think he, himself, will nominate better SCOTUS justices than Hillary. I’ll do it because he’ll have to run to the legislative majority to get anything done – and if we don’t have a GOP Senate or House, we’re truly screwed. And if Trump doesn’t win convincingly, then the coat-tail effect will tend to increase the power of the worthless whackdoodle Democrats.
And that is the only reason.
So I’ll be going to caucuses tonight. Hope to see you there.
Much has been said this election cycle about the value of having a candidate who, by way of “saying what needs to be said”, isn’t “afraid” to be “politically incorrect”.
Of course, I’d like to see that person also have at least some hint of civilization, as well as show some evidence of being able to accomplish the stuff they’re talking about.
Unfortunately, Jeremy Clarkson is neither available nor eligible to run for president.
A picture is worth 1,000 words.
This cartoon could have saved me 10,000 in writing about the relationship between libertarians, Libertarians, “Libertarians”, and the GOP / conservatism:
It’s dead-on – both metaphorically and, all too often here in Minnesota, literally.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Gun control advocates snicker that men own guns to compensate for having small genitals, and that 20,000 men commit suicide by gun each year because they won’t seek mental health treatment.
Item 3 on President Obama’s list of new proposal says anybody who does seek mental health treatment loses his right to own guns.
In other words, men who seek help will be castrated.
Amazingly, this is not encouraging men to flock to mental health treatment centers. Perhaps this newest proposal is ill-considered?
But it’s for their own good! We must take away their guns so they don’t get into trouble!
Uh huh, that’s what they told the tomcat on the way to the vet.
Joe Doakes
If you wanna run with an analogy, why not commit to the bit?
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