Baltimore Sun “reporter” Tricia Bishop, on her way to admitting she worries less about criminals than law-abiding gun owners (in Baltimore.  I’ll let that bit of knot-headedness sink in), says:

And so, as President Barack Obama announced plans this week to tighten background checks for gun buyers and increase gun tracking and research, I thought, that’s all well and good, but how about adding something immediately useful: a gun owner registry available to the public online — something like those for sex offenders. I’m not equating gun owners with predatory perverts, but the model is helpful here; I want a searchable database I can consult to find out whether my kid can have a play date at your house.

Ms. Bishop:  First, how about we have a database of people who don’t like guns.  I mean, you’re the ones trying to shave away at the edges of a constitutional right – isn’t the burden of, well, being burdened, on you?

Why not let’s try this:  we put in in a public database that says:

I, TRICIA BISHOP, AM UNARMED AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE!

And maybe post one of these in your yard:

You do that for a couple years, we can talk.

The next time some liberal friend of yours cites the Zimmerman-Martin shooting as a gross injustice – a “white man shooting an unarmed black child” – refer them to this long, but utterly impeccably researched series by the great Massood Ayoob.

Then sweep up the debris of their “argument”.

Side benefit; you’ll likely learn a lot yourself.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

State Senate passed an omnibus bill (not yet law).  Section 8, Article 28, starting at line 195.20, says:  

Sec. 28. IMMIGRATION INTEGRATION ADVISORY TASK FORCE.

(a) The Immigration Integration Advisory Task Force is created to research state laws

and rules that negatively affect immigrants. The task force is composed of the following:

(1) five members appointed by the governor to represent Minnesota’s diverse

immigrant communities;

(2) two members of the house of representatives, one appointed by the speaker of

the house and one appointed by the minority leader; and

(3) two senators, one appointed by the senate majority leader and one appointed by

the senate minority leader.

(b) At its first meeting, the task force shall elect a chair and cochair from its

membership. The commissioner of human rights shall provide meeting space and

administrative and staff support for the task force.

(c) The task force shall conduct research and hold meetings to:

(1) determine the extent to which current state laws and rules negatively affect

Minnesotans based on their status as immigrants; and

(2) develop methods to ensure that future proposed state laws and rules consider

the impact of the proposals on immigrants.

The task force shall consult with the Minnesota Council on Latino Affairs, the Council for

Minnesotans of African Heritage, and the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans. The task

force shall report to the chairs and ranking minority members of the committees in the

house of representatives and the senate with jurisdiction over human rights by January 15,

2017, with recommendations and draft legislation for changes in state laws, consistent

with federal law, that will reduce the negative impact of state laws on immigrants, and

ensure that future state laws and rules consider the impact on immigrants.

(d) The appointing authorities must make their initial appointments by August 1,

2016. The commissioner of human rights shall convene the first meeting of the task

force by September 1, 2016.

(e) Public members shall be compensated and reimbursed for expenses as provided

in Minnesota Statutes, section 15.059, subdivision 3.

(f) The task force shall expire on January 30, 2017, or the day after submitting the

report required under paragraph (c), whichever is earlier.

EFFECTIVE DATE.

This section is effective the day following final enactment.

 So the DFL will pack it with Liberals and Rent Seekers who will write a report to the Legislature detailing how hateful our laws are.  What then?

Take Murder, for instance.  If my daughter dates a Jew, she shames me, shames my whole family.  I must kill her, my religion says so.  But Minnesota law says no.  Hateful.

Accommodate or assimilate? 

Joe Doakes

Assimilate in your accomodation.  Peasant.

Today would have been Joey Ramone’s 65th birthday:

And it’s hard to believe he’s been dead for 15 years.

I’ll be broadcasting live from the GOP State Convention on Friday from 6-8PM, and again on Saturday fro 1-3PM.

I’m neither a delegate nor a member of the State Central Committee, so I won’t be voting on anything

But I will be doing my level best to help any group that seeks to limit the power of the Judicial Elections Commission.  Perhaps not end the JEC, per se – but in exchange for leaving the JEC alive, I want the heads of those responsible for the Michelle MacDonald debacle displayed on pikes outside the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center.

Rhetorically speaking, of course.

Speaking of Michelle MacDonald:  she’s running for the Supreme Court again.  That’s certainly her right; hopefully the convention chair won’t make the same mistake that happened in 2014.

Speaking of MacDonald – her followers are making the technically true but contextually laughable assertion that MacDonald got a higher percentage of the vote than any other GOP candidate in 2014.   Which is true…

…and also deeply misleading – and I can not wait for the first MacDonald supporter to try to bring that up on the air.

MacDonald got 46% and change, it’s true – running mostly against the GOP, and little or not at all against David Lillehaug (who ran, effectively, no campaign at all).  As I pointed out after the last election, all contested judicial elections get an average of 35-40% – it’s an outlet for people’s obstinacy, apparently (I always, always vote for challengers, whether I know or care about them or not, and I can not be the only one).

So MacDonald got about 4% more than “background noise”.  And while I have no empirical evidence for this, I’m going to speculate with confidence that had she not been running against Darth Lillehaug – one of the most anti-gun politicians (excuse me, “jurists”) in the business, she’d have come in in the thirties without a whole lot of shooters voting against Lillehaug and not for MacDonald.

So while my actual means for dealing with the JEC and MacDonald are limited, I’m going to use what I can to encourage those who can do something about it to seriously punish the JEC, and send MacDonald back to famlaw.

Speaking of family?  Read this time-line of MacDonald’s most famous case.  I have no idea if MacDonald was involved in any wrongdoing – specifically, the systematic alienation of a custodial father’s children against him – but as a matter of principle, everyone who interferes with another parent’s access to their kids should rot in hell.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is buying topsoil at Kern Landscaping in Saint Paul.    Busily loading his car, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE climbing out of an oil-belching Subaru wagon to make a deposit.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!  If we elect Hillary, we’ll get Bill Clinton for co-president!

BERG:  So?

LIBRELLE:  That means the economy will boom!

BERG:  Wait – didn’t NPR tell me the economy is already booming?

LIBRELLE:  It’ll boom even more!

BERG:  OK.  So we’ll get Bill Clinton.  Will we also get Newt Gingrich?

LIBRELLE:  No.  Why?  Hisssssssssssssss!

BERG:  Because it was the Gingrich Congress’s enforcement of fiscal discipline on the Clinton Administration after the 1994 Republican Wave that kept the Feds out of the way of the economic boom.  By the way, speaking of boom – will there be any empires falling, paving the way for a massive transfer of resources from the military?

LIBRELLE:  Huh?

BERG:  The “Peace Dividend”.  When the USSR collapsed – thanks to Ronald Reagan – the US was able to move a lot of defense spending to civilian uses.  Which dumped a ton of money, skill and technology into the civilian market.   Which led, after a brief recession, to the beginning of a boom that ran until 9/11.

So – if Hillary plans to bring back a conservative Congress and has another “peace dividend” in her purse, we might have ourselves a deal.

LIBRELLE:  (Stands, mutely flapping jaw)

BERG:  Have a nice day, Avery.

(And SCENE)

A reader emails:

This article, about young women prostituting themselves, quotes Colorado Univ professor Joanne Belnap:

“I don’t want to blame the women because I feel like it is a way to get a college education, which I feel really strongly about,” she said. “We live in a culture where women are paid so unfairly compared to men. It’s not surprising that women would do this when you think of the level of sexual harassment women have to put up with at their jobs that pay a lot less. It’s a sad state of where we’re investing money in this society.”

Prostitution is an extremely old profession, yet none of the women that I know have ever felt so repressed by society that they have felt the need to do this.  Having been a college student myself, and having watched how my peers sometimes mismanage money, I don’t really buy into the “poor college student” stereotype. These are women whose “parents and scholarships are paying for tuition”- per the article. I am sure if there were other needs, parents would be happier to help than to have prostitutes for children. If all the young women were after were wants, well, that they won’t forego those desires until they are more financially stable is probably more problematic than any imagined societal repression of women.  And, I’m not sure who is being repressed. I mean, there is the other unexplored topic of men being seen as only useful for their money.

Am I just old fashioned in thinking this way?

Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m just amazed – and by “amazed”, I mean “not really amazed, but getting cynical and sarcastic about the endless Orwellian doublespeak” – that a college professor is telling people women are paid less than men for any reasons other than personal and lifestyle choices.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US economy grew in the first quarter of 2016, but only a tiny bit, 0.5%.  That’s technically enough to keep us out of a “recession.”

 First, do you believe that number?  Economic estimates are routinely announced with pronounced spin showing how well the administration’s policies are working, then quietly revised downward a few months later.  There’s not much room to revise this number downward.

 Second, look at the formula for calculating GDP: 

Gross Domestic Product = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + (Exports – Imports)

 If the federal government wants the GDP number to look good, it can manipulate the result by increasing government spending to offset decreases in Consumption, Investment and Net Exports.  But federal government spending slowed down in the first quarter as Quantitative Easing winds down.  And the GDP number is falling as a result.  The implications are important.

 It means there never was any growth in the Consumer or Investment side of the economy, that’s all been propped up by federal government spending.  In other words, we’ve been experiencing negative economic growth for months, maybe years, but it’s been masked by federal government spending.  I’m looking at you, Barack Obama, and your $20 Trillion national debt.

 The take-away is simple: don’t worry about Great Depression 2.0 coming; it’s already here.  Worry about what happens when the ordinary public figures it out.

 Joe Doakes

Look!  Bathrooms!

Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis City Councilor Alondra Cano and Minneapolis NAACP president Nekima Levy-Pounds complaining about being “victims of racism” – Cano for having been criticized by her fellow councilpeople, Levy-Pounds for being scolded for barging in and interrupting giving public input at a Park Board meeting where public input was not on the agenda.

So I have to ask – is it even possible for…:

• Cano, a senior member of a one-party political system that controls Minneapolis no les scompletely than the Stasi controlled East Germany, a woman who has the sort of power that mere citizens can’t possible imagine, a woman who is guaranteed a much-better-than-living-wage for the rest of her life, between the political system and the rent-seeking non-profit sector, even if she doesn’t run for mayor or the Legislature (as, rumor has it, she will), and accede to even more power and long-term wealth, and…
• Levy-Pounds, a professor with tenure – she can never be fired from her job (unless Saint Thomas law school closes) who earns an upper-middle-class income and has the sort of social and political access that nobody in this audience does, a woman who can get Betsy Hodges and Chris Coleman to say “how high, ma’am?” when she says “Jump”

…to feel “racism” in any way that matters given their status as “One Percenters” in the social and political class diagram?

I say “that matters” because after a certain point, as the great African-American and arch-liberal columnist William Raspberry once said, at a certain point you have to realize racism is just ignorance, and beneath you.   Given the power and status that the likes of Cano and Levy-Pounds have accreted, isn’t “racism” to them sort of like Erik Pusey criticizing my writing – it is irrelevant, and has no real, tangible impact on my interaction with the real world?

Williamson’s Victor Davis Hanson’s ¹ piece – on the bureaucracy full of smug, entitled, thirtysomething bureaucrats who have such disporportionate control over this country today – is worth a read from beginning to end.

But this quote was the payoff:

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

But read it all anyway.

¹ Yeah, it’s been that kind of morning.

Kevin Williamson is right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, public sector jobs were filled by patronage, which led to massive incompetence and frequent turnover.  These employees could get away with lousy service without repercussion because their jobs didn’t depend on customer service, they depended on remaining in favor.

 Later, public sector jobs are filled by civil service procedures to avoid nepotism and favoritism, hopefully resulting in more competent employees.  These employees couldn’t give the public lousy service because they’d be disciplined or even fired.

 In states like Minnesota, public sector jobs became union jobs with the adoption of the Public Employment Labor Relations Act in 1984.  They’re still filled by civil service exams but now they’re union jobs so employees can get away with lousy service without repercussion because it’s so difficult to discipline or fire a public union employee.  Local media attention or legislative scrutiny often is required before action is taken.

 I once submitted documents to the County Recorder but they were rejected.  The phone conversation went something like this: “Why were my documents rejected?  We can’t give you legal advice.  I don’t want legal advice, I want to know what’s wrong with my documents so I can fix them to get them recorded.  Read the statute.  I did read the statute, I still can’t see anything wrong with my documents.  Consult a lawyer.  I AM A LAWYER AND AS FAR AS I CAN TELL THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH MY DOCUMENTS SO WHAT’S THE PROBLM?  I’ll refer you to my supervisor.” 

 I don’t know whether that’s incompetence, malice, stupidity, or just an idiotic policy, but it did not delight the customer.

 And in the federal government, it’s even worse: public sector jobs are union jobs, supposedly filled by civil service process except the bosses are political appointees so the workers actually selected to fill positions tend to mirror the boss’s political views.  The federal government workforce leans Democrat so they have no personal qualms about treating Tea Party fundraisers less well than Move On fundraisers, for example.  Massive media attention and Congressional inquiries were insufficient to motivate the IRS to discipline anybody.

 Maybe this will get their attention.

 Joe Doakes

Something will have to, someday.  Perhaps it’ll be DC collapsing.

Today, Syttende Mai, is the 111th anniversary of the Norske Revolusjon – when Norwegian patriots, chafing under decades of Swedish/Danish tyranny, rebelled, casting off the brutal, authoritarian Swedish monarchy in an epic cataclysm that ended in a titanic battle in the hills outside Kristiansand, a crushing victory for the grossly-outnumbered Norwegians that sent the demoralized Swedes into a panicked retreat in the short term, and a social tailspin in the long run.

After the battle, and when the treaty was signed that granted Norway its hard=earned independence, General Olaf Haraldsson proclaimed:

Med allmektige Gud som vitne i dag, jeg sverger før du at fra i dag fram til slutten av tid og norsk skal noensinne baugen ned før en svenske. Det er bare galt

Words we cal all live by?  I think we can all agree on this.

So happy birthday, Norway!

(more…)

The transportation, tax and bonding bills are all a shambles.

So what is the Minnesota DFL focused on?

Baseball players and their tobacco.

The bill was introduced Monday by Rep. Mike Freiberg, DFL-Golden Valley. It would ban the use of tobacco at Target Field, CHS Field and other professional sports stadiums in Minnesota.

“We need to make smokeless tobacco use in baseball a remnant of the past – and Minnesota should be proud to play a role in that movement,” said Freiberg Monday. “By allowing smokeless tobacco at the ballparks, we send the absolute wrong message about tobacco use. It’s time to take tobacco out of the game completely for the good of baseball and the health of our kids and players alike.”

Five years after Governor Flint-Smith Dayton got his Vikings Stadium deal, he admits his “e-pulltab” proposal – which was supposed to fund the state’s share of Zygi Wilf’s real-estate upgrade – was a flop (emphasis added):

By now, it’s a well-known fact that the plan to fund the state’s $498 million share of the new Vikings stadium with revenue from electronic pulltabs was a bust, but now Gov. Mark Dayton is owning up to it.

“You know, there were multiple errors made, and in hindsight, obviously we were terribly wrong,” Dayton toldMinnesota Public Radio.

Well, no, Governor Flint-Smith Dayton; you and the hysterical ninnies in the Legislature who buckled under to a bunch of louts dressed in fake Vikingwear were terribly wrong.

We – conservatives, people who both believe it’s not government’s job to build stadiums, and who do our freaking homework about shiny toys like e-pulltabs – were terribly right all along.

Wendy’s follows McDonalds in moving to automated kiosks in its thousand and thousands of restaurants:

After New York City and California mandated $15 minimum-wage laws, fast-food chain Wendy’s reacted, announcing Thursday its plans to make available self-serving kiosks in its 6,000-plus restaurants across the country by year’s end.

In addition to using the technology to cut down on labor costs, Wendy’s President Todd Penegor noted on the company’s quarterly conference call, that some of its franchise locations have been raising prices to offset the minimum-wage increase, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

“Wendy’s Penegor said company-operated stores, only about 10 percent of the total, are seeing wage inflation of 5 percent to 6 percent, driven both by the minimum wage and some by the need to offer a competitive wage ‘to access good labor,’” IBD reported.

Why, it’s almost as if you’d think the left would have to know that artificially raising the minimum wage without increases in skill and productivity is going to increase unemployment among low-skill, low-wage workers, thus increasing dependence on government (thus increasing employment for government workers and their unions) or something.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This guy will use any stick to beat his favorite horses so I’m not endorsing his analysis.  The rise in births to unmarried mothers could be due to some other factor – unpopularity of shotgun marriages, for instance.

 But his claims that mixed race children grow up without fathers, and without paternal support, are interesting as they tie to other factors.  Children raised by single mothers are more likely to live in poverty.  Boys having no positive male role model more easily slip into violence and crime.

 It’s worth asking if the rise in illegitimacy might be related to the present furor over Black incarceration rates, police shootings protested by Black Lives Matter, 1,000 people shot (so far) in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Chicago, and Democrats’ collective fantasy that passing more gun laws will solve society’s problems.  Maybe traditional sexual morality restrained more than it appeared; maybe knocking down those barriers let loose more than we anticipated. 

 Oddly, why did unwed childbearing rates drop across the board in the 1990’s?  Newt Gingrich pushed through welfare reform and Clinton signed it in 1996, but the rate took a dive before the effects of the law could have been felt.  Why did women stop having babies out of wedlock, and why did they start up, again?

 Anyway, the charts are interesting. 

 Joe Doakes

The link between unwed parents and poverty is pretty iron-clad.

The letter that sat on the desk of Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had been eagerly awaited.

Addressed from France’s Ambassador to Britain, Paul Cambon, the contents of the letter were the result of nearly five months of negotiations between Britain and France to reshape the Middle East after the hoped-for fall of the Ottoman Empire.  Despite the failings of the Entente to make progress on the battlefield, diplomats Sir Mark Sykes of England and François Georges-Picot of France had sought out success at the negotiating table, slicing and dicing Turkish lands.

What would become known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement would first unite, and then embarrass the Entente, while setting the foundation for the next 100 years of engagement between the Middle East and the West.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement – the final map of the Middle East after World War I wouldn’t be much different

100 years earlier, Europe had seemingly settled most of the map of the world with the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna.  The result had ultimately satisfied no one, with most of the attendees echoing the parting words of Britain’s Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, who regarded the final treaty as little more than “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.”  For Stewart’s heirs across the various powers, the Great War seemed a grand opportunity to re-draft the map of the world for another century.

From the war’s first shots, both the Entente and Central Powers had cast their eyes onto their rival’s territories with hopes of expansion.  Whether it was the British and French trying to digest German African colonies, or the Ottomans seeking to expand their Empire to Persia, millions were dying or being maimed for the right to claim sections of the globe most the warring power’s citizens didn’t even know existed.   (more…)

The last surviving credited cast member from the movie “Casablanca”, French actress Madeline LeBeau, has died.  She was 92.

LeBeau, in a still from a scene cut from “Casablanca”

The cause was complications from a broken thigh bone, her stepson, documentary filmmaker and mountaineer Carlo Alberto Pinelli, told the Hollywood Reporter.

Ms. LeBeau (sometimes credited as Lebeau) was the last surviving credited cast member of “Casablanca” (1942), which the American Film Institute lists as the second greatest movie of all time. “Citizen Kane” is No. 1, according to the film preservation group.

She played Rick Blaine’s (Humphrey Bogart) jilted girlfriend in the early part of the movie…:

I have no idea where the subtitles come from. Bizarre.

…and then reappeared during the famous “La Marseillaise” scene:

(Along with her husband at the time, Emil the Croupier, who hands Major Renault his winnings at the end of the clip).

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is trimming weeds by his driveway with a grass whip.  

Before he can react, Avery LIBRELLE – who is walking through the alley making notes about people who aren’t separating their recycling – surprises him.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!   Why are you people so panicky about transgenders picking their own restrooms?

BERG:  I’m not.  The whole thing is a tempest in a teapot – except of course for the Feds stepping in to make, literally, a federal issue about something that is really no issue at all.

LIBRELLE:  But you Republicans are all angry and scared!

BERG:  Enh.  Not me.  I’ve worked around some transgendered people.  It’s really no big deal.

LIBRELLE:   Ha ha ha ha ha!  Hah!  You should know that transgender people are very very unlikely to commit any crime at all!

BERG:  Right.  I know that.  But let me ask you, Avery – since transgendered people have a very very very low crime rate, we shouldn’t be imposing all sorts of pointless regulations on who goes into what restroom?

LIBRELLE:   Right!  That would be bigoted and transphobic!

BERG:  Bigotry and a design-your-own phobia!  Exactly!  Being mortally afraid of, and imposing pointless regulations that will have absolutely no affect on crime, on populations that have essentially negligible offense rates, is bigotry and phobia!

LIBRELLE:  Exactly!

BERG:  (Getting excited)  In fact, we should never impose pointless rules and regulations on people who commit vastly fewer crimes than the general population, because such regulations are rooted in bigotry and fear!

LIBRELLE:  Yes!  Absolutely!

BERG:  All of them!

LIBRELLE:  All of them! (LIBRELLE leaps up, kicks heels in glee)

BERG:  So background checks for law-abiding citizens transferring guns are…

LIBRELLE:  (Not quite realizing the change in subject) Phobic and bigo…HEY!

And SCENE. 

…to the Saint Paul police PR operator who wrote this tweet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Americans of my generation are dreamers.  We grew up believing the future held flying cars, any boy could become President or even better, an astronaut, and we’d eventually find the Perfect Girl.  We grew up believing America was the greatest nation on Earth, prosperity was here to stay and things would only get better, for ourselves and for our children.

 What do people like that do when flying cars turn out to be crappy little tin cans, when American astronauts have to hitch rides on Russian rockets, when The Girl leaves, taking the children with her?  What do we believe in when the President tells us “You didn’t build that,” sends jobs out of the country, brings in millions of welfare leeches and not only lets our sworn enemies have The Bomb, he pays them $100 Billion to do it? 

 What is left to believe in, when mental illness becomes constitutional right, when a lifetime of savings and equity evaporates, when college students are afraid of chalk and seemingly sensible people can no longer figure out which bathroom to use?

What do you do when your dream dies?  White Male suicide is skyrocketing.  Is losing the dream, the reason why?

 Doesn’t matter – you DESERVE to die.  Because Privilege. 

 Joe Doakes

And people ask why Trump is doing so very very well these days.

For an operation that the Dual Monarchy had hinged on careful coordination, seemingly nothing had gone according to plan.

The scale of the forces involved could hardly be concealed.  400,000 men, complete with nearly 2,000 pieces of heavy artillery, had sat nestled into the Austrian Alps for months on the Italian/Austro-Hungarian border.  Record snowfall had kept the men confined to their trenches as whatever element of surprise the Austro-Hungarians once held slowly melted as surely as the white powder around them.

Having been on the defensive in Italy for a year, the Austro-Hungarian troops were now fed promises of dealing their hated Italian enemies a crushing blow.  General Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Dual Monarchy’s Chief of Staff, had labeled the coming offensive a Strafexpedition or “punitive expedition” against Italy.  While the tactical goal was ideally to cut off the Italians from the majority of their armies to the south in the Isonzo river valley, the more honest strategic purpose was simply to raze as much of Italy as possible for having joined the Entente.  At last, the Dual Monarchy was finally prepared to have their revenge.

On May 15th, 1916 the Austro-Hungarian army wasn’t looking to beat Italy, but to punish her.

—

The ruins of Asiago. The city, deep in what is now northern Italy, then closer to the border, was devastated by the Austro-Hungarian offensive

Long before Italy had cast it’s lot with the Entente, the simmering hostilities between the Dual Monarchy and Rome were well known among the diplomats of Europe.  France’s ambassador to Italy, Camille Barrère, defined the relationship between the two nations as “enemy-allies.”  Despite each nation’s participation in the Triple Alliance with Germany, the Austrians resented their defeats within the Italian Risorgimento and the Italians longed to acquire territory at the Dual Monarchy’s expense.  As late as 1911, the Austro-Hungarians were contemplating a preemptive assault against their nominal Italian allies.   (more…)

Here’s how to learn more about Paul Anderson, running for State Senate in SD44.

And of course, ♫  today’s music 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!

• I’ll be talking with author Gary Moore.  

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.

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