You might recall Minneapolis City Councilor Alonda Cano; last winter, she was abusing her access to city data to “shame” people who criticized her support for Black Lives Matter.  Then, when called for alleged laziness by (of all outlets) the City Pages, she…

…well, that actually brings us up to this week:

Tuesday evening, it was Cano’s turn to join the public conversation, doing so in the form of a Facebook post on her city council page. Cano wrote it was “hurtful and disappointing” to read the words “lazy,” “always late,” and “clueless” used to describe her work ethic on the council.

“It is important to illuminate,” Cano went on, “that these words, when used to frame women and people of color, carry a history of coded language that serve to create negative racial stereotypes.”

That could be.

Those words, when referring to someone who’d rather grandstand than learn their damn job, are also not-coded-at-all terms to refer to lazy, inconsiderate people who don’t do their homework, whatever their skin color.

Cano wrote that the negative story “weighed on me heavily,” and she went back and forth on whether she should respond to it. After all, she and her south Minneapolis constituents in the Ninth Ward have far greater concerns: wage theft, slumlords, a lack of paid sick time for workers, even working moms.

Which Cano, apparently, isn’t doing jack for.

“However,” Cano continued, “when loaded and biased attacks occur, it is vital that we stand up and speak the truth. In this case, this story was racist, sexist, and it was an attempt to smear all of the things I stand for.

Well, no.  It was an attempt to tell the public that Cano – who reportedly has ambitions to run for Mayor or the Legislature – isn’t doing a very good job, when her job doesn’t involve granstanding, or taking spiffy trips on the taxpayer’s dime.

I want you to know that I am unabashed in my commitment to continuing to advance a racial and social justice agenda no matter the backlash.”

Let’s take a moment to go over what just happened.  Alondra Cano – an elected member of a power bloc with absolute one-party control of a major city, a person with in effect a lifetime sinecure either in government or non-profits for her and (likely) her entire family, one who wields the kind of power that mere citizens don’t even know how to dream of – is trying to paint herself as a victim.

Cano – like Nekima Levy-Pounds, another person with immense power and privilege herself – is perfectly fine using her position to shame critics who don’t buy newsprint by the trainload; when someone – even the lowly City Pages – comes along and hits her from the level, she cries “victimization”.  

Question, Minneapolis:  Do you deserve better, or not?

I finally found a “public servant” I can get behind; Minneapolis Park Board member Liz Wielinski cut Nekima Levy-Pounds off at the knees when the local NAACP leader interrrupted, out of order, at a Park Board meeting:

“I’m tired of this. You keep interrupting our meetings,” Wielinski shouted after Levy-Pounds began to speak. “You’re a crude, interrupting adult.”

Any bets on how Levy-Pounds responded?

No bets?

I never get any bets on the response.

With good reason (emphasis added):

Levy-Pounds, who has been involved in multiple protests over racial disparities in recent months, accused Wielinski of exercising white supremacy and speaking to her as a slave. The exchange was recorded on video and later posted on Facebook.
“I’m not your child. Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” Levy-Pounds, a law professor, told Wielinski.

Levy-Pounds is a child; more accurately, a spoiled, entitled teenager, used to stomping over whatever she wants and crying “racist” at anyone who raises a finger at her.

“I was berated and yelled at like a child,” Levy-Pounds said Thursday.

If only.

As for Wielinski?  She’s go the right perspective:

Wielinski said Thursday that she has apologized to the board for an exchange she compared to “The Jerry Springer Show,” but said she has no apology to make to Levy-Pounds. She said Levy-Pounds and others could avail themselves of the board’s regularly scheduled public comment period at other meetings.
“I think I shouldn’t have lost my temper, but we were within our rights to ask people to respect the process,” she said.

One wonders how Ms. Levy-Pounds would react if someone interrupted an NAACP meeting.

To:  The Abovementioned
From: Mitch Berg, Mere Peasant
Re:  Your signage where your mouths are

All,

You are the leaders of Minnesota’s gun-grabber movement.  You and your wan little pack of Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing, NPR-listening, St. Olaf-graduating, ELCA-coiffed followers want to take away Minnesotans’ right and means to defend themselves.

Now, crime in Minnesota is very, very low – and a higher percentage of Minnesotans have carry permits than Texans.  Crime is lowest of all in places where the number of legally-carried guns is the highest.

And vice versa.

So you all live in your hideaways in Kenwood, Saint Anthony Park, Crocus Hill, Rochester and Saint Louis Park, in part made safer by the deterrent effect of all of us shooters.

So why not make an integrity move, and eschew that deterrence?

Put one of these babies in your yard:

Show America’s gun culture that you  patently reject the collateral benefit of their – our – prudence!

Tell Minnesota – all Minnesotans – that you trust all 5.5 million of your neighbors to stay honest.  Tell them that you implicitly trust that if something goes hinky, that you trust the police will be there fast enough to make a difference.

You do trust the police to protect you, just as you want us to trust them – don’t you?

Please see to this immediately.

What?  You’re not afraid, are you?

Because I’d hate to think you all were a bunch of hypocrites.

That is all.

Joe Doakes convenes a meeting of the Immigration Integration Advisory Task Force, via email:

C: This session of the Immigration Integration Advisory Task Force will come to order. The Secretary will call the roll:
S: Madam Chairman . . .
C: Excuse me. I find that offensive. I prefer a gender-neutral title.
S: Certainly Madame Chair.
C: I am not a “Chair,” I am a human being. And I am offended by “Madame.” I prefer a gender-neutral title for that, too, in case I change my mind about my gender while we’re in session. You can address me as “Mix.”

(more…)

Tyler Gottwalt strapped on an AK47 and took a walk.  He was looking for trouble…

…in pretty much the same way Martin Luther King was.  He set out to flush out an illegal law.

And he found it.  While the Sauk Rapids cops knew the law – citizens with carry permits are allowed to carry uncased long arms in public – the Saint Cloud PD didn’t.  They arrested Gottwalt, citing a city ordinance.

We’ll let the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance take up the story next:

As Professor Olson notes in the video, Saint Cloud can’t regulate guns differently than the state does, due to the state’s pre-emption ordinance. Which makes the SCPD’s arrest an illegal one.

Gottwalt is sueing the city. I hope he wins and wins big.

The Early ’70s – the National Coalition to Ban Handguns distributes signs indicating that the home is “proud to be gun-free”.

They made the usual, predictable media splash – the nation’s opinion-pushers were pretty roundly anti-gun in those days, and they’d done a pretty fair job of bandwagoning a good chunk of American opinion into line with them.

But then a funny thing happened.

The robbery rates in “gun-free homes” shot through the roof; owners of posted homes found that they were being robbed at a rate vastly, vastly, utterly, screamingly, almost satirically higher than their neighbors.

So the signs disappeared almost as fast as the “no guns allowed” signs vanished from Twin Cities bars after “gun-free” bars found themselves getting stuck up at an alarming rate.

We’re seeing a pattern here – right?

And by “we” I mean anyone whose EKG is ticking in the least bit.

Because not everybody does.

UPDATE:  Hah!  It look like the “red light” story is from a satire site!   The story is fake…

…but accurate.

In other words, I’ve fallen for a line that is devoid of fact.  Just like Senator Latz, Representatives Norton and Schoen, Heather Martens, the Right Reverend Nancy Nord Bence, Joan Peterson and Nick Coleman.  Only mine doesn’t trample the Constitution and get innocent people killed.

A thirteen minute lowlight reel of Hillary’s lies:

She’s for gay marriage and against it!

She’s “second to none” in her progressivism and her moderation

90% of her emails were on State Department systems, and one percent were!

And that was just the first four minutes!

Pass it on to a Democrat friend.

(Via Powerline)

To: Minnesota Public Radio News
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Food For Thought

MPR,

Isn’t it annoying – to say the least – to have to subject your constitutional freedoms to theatrical, unproductive and degrading scrutiny by bureaucrats, to no useful end?

A few minutes after 8 o’clock Monday morning, [MPR Reporter] Mukhtar Ibrahim started filing through the security line at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis.
It was a big day for Ibrahim, and figured to be a long one: Day one of a high-profile trial for three local men accused of plotting to join ISIS fighters in Syria.

Ibrahim and a reporter for the Star Tribune approached the security screening and offered their bags for clearance by a security officer. The other reporter, who is white, passed right through and headed for the elevator. Ibrahim was stopped, and told he couldn’t go in yet. He would have to wait for the time when the court opened to the public.

If it saves even one life…!

Ibrahim protested, pulling out a press badge showing he works for Minnesota Public Radio. Not good enough, the officer said. Go wait with the rest of the public.

Ibrahim didn’t argue and instead just collected his wallet, keys, and bag, and went to wait with public spectators. The way Ibrahim figures, he shouldn’t have even needed to flash the badge. He’s been covering cases there for a year and a half: These guys should recognize him by now.

People with a long, proven record of not abusing free speech are almost never a danger!

On Monday, once Ibrahim and the rest of the non-journalists observers there for the trial were let in, he simply walked across the courtroom to the area sectioned-off for members of the media and sat down. But the episode continued to eat at him.

“It messed up my mood the whole day,” Ibrahim said. “I was just really frustrated. I didn’t expect this.”

It is frustrating, isn’t it?  Trying to go about your business, doing something you have a Constitutional right to do, and getting badgered by petty bureaucrats?

“I like to stick to the facts,” Ibrahim said, “so I’ll let people make their own conclusions of this.”

The obvious answer; force all reporters to take a background check.

That’ll fix it.

That is all.

…but I will say that his Second Amendment stance, expressed here in writing, is aggressively excellent.

Especially this bit here:

NATIONAL RIGHT TO CARRY. The right of self-defense doesn’t stop at the end of your driveway. That’s why I have a concealed carry permit and why tens of millions of Americans do too. That permit should be valid in all 50 states. A driver’s license works in every state, so it’s common sense that a concealed carry permit should work in every state. If we can do that for driving – which is a privilege, not a right – then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege.

Given how often Trump is accused of making verbal promises he has no idea how to deliver, it’s kind of funny seeing him showing the gun control movement – which has been doing the same thing in fact for almost 50 years.

The press isn’t so crazy about background checks – when it’s their freedom this being walked all over:

For the first time this year, the Secret Service has a hand in credentialing the media; during previous conventions only the Congressional press galleries were in charge of credentialing the media…[Buzzfeed “editor” John Stanton] Stanton cited concerns about the background checks, the lack of a clear appeals process, and the involvement of a third-party subcontractor, urging his fellow journalists to express their concern over the process.“It seems like an unnecessary step and it gives them in my mind a new and troubling precedence to try and exert authority over the press corps,” Stanton said in an interview. “It creates a logistical burden, a troubling precedent for their ability to have almost a de facto say in who is qualified to be a reporter at these events. What if they use this as precedent to extend to other campaign events or any government events?”

Right – but if it saves just one life…

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 it from being called 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 formula by increasing government spending to offset decreases in Consumption, Investment and Net Exports.  But federal government spending slowed down in the first quarter.  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

Like we need any more good news this week…

Ever since Governor Dayton passed one of the highest taxes in the nation on people earning over about $150,000 a year, conservatives have been predicting an exodus of the productive class.

The Minnesota left is doing cartwheels over “data” showing it’s not happened…

…sort of.  I add emphasis:

The ranks of the very rich are growing in Minnesota, despite a controversial tax increase that singles out the biggest earners to pay more.

Critics predicted that the ultra-affluent would flee after Gov. Mark Dayton secured 2013 passage of a new income tax tier of 9.85 percent on individuals who make more than $156,000 a year. But the latest data show that the number of people who filed tax returns with over $1 million in income grew by 15.3 percent in the year after the tax passed, while the new top tier of taxpayers grew by 6 percent.

So many holes in this “story”:

People making over a million a year – the “ultrarich” – can live anywhere they want;  the Twin Cities are a great place to be rich; good quality of life with lots of bigger-city amenities, and your dollar, after taxes, still goes a ways.   That’s why so many big corporations have their headquarters in the Twin Cities, even though they haven’t hired a non-service blue-collar worker in Minnesota in decades; it’s a great place to be a CEO.

As to the number of people in the >$156K tax bracket rising?  So what?  As the value of the dollar drops, and inflation creeps in, more real estate agents, dentists, software architects, insurance salespeople and the like find their incomes creeping upward from $145K to $156K.

But you have to then ask:

• How many of them hit that $156K mark, stew on it for a year or so, and decide to move to Hudson or Fargo or Superior?
• How many more would have reached that threshold if it weren’t for the tax hike?

The answers, by the way are “anecdotally, many” and “the Strib, being Tina Flint-Smith’s waterboys, sure aren’t going to tell us”.

Rapper Azealea Banks noted something has been screechingly obvious for decades, to anyone who’s not competely left-addled:

On Saturday afternoon, singer Azealia Banks expressed her support for the GOP candidate in a spree of tweets, kicking off the conversation with, “I REALLY want Donald Trump to win the election.”

And…:

Hillary talks to black people as if we’re children or pets. i can’t stand herrrrrrr.

— BRUJA DEL BLOQUE (@AZEALIABANKS) May 7, 2016

Ms. Banks has a point.

It’s a point originally made by none other than Malcolm X himself:

Sixty years ago, 40% of African-Americans voted GOP.  That changed in 1960, when Kennedy reeled in the black vote with promises of civil rights legislation…

…on which he promptly reneged.

As the Democrat party has done, over and over again, for two generations.   Indeed, virtually every problem that the urban African-American community has, these days, springs from their relentless support of the Democrat machines that run their cities…into the ground.

Ms. Banks won’t be able to get a table at Carl’s Junior after this, at least in show-biz circles, of course.   But she – and Mr. X – are both right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Sure, things are great now but in 80 years, they’ll suck.  So give me all your money today.

 There’s a reason that message doesn’t resonate with ordinary voters and it has nothing to do with science.

 Joe Doakes

The climate mafia strives for Al Capone.  They achieve something more like Elmer Gantry.

Sources tell Gizmodo that Facebook routinely gundecked “conservative” news – spiking it from the “trending” news section, even if it was legitimately, y’know, trending (and buffing up stories that management wanted pushed):

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site.

Tangential note:  you’re a young “journalist” with an Ivy-League degree.  You’re working as a “curator” for Facebook.

Contact me.  I’ll refer you to a good suicide hotline.  You’re gonna need it sooner than later.

I digress:

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

It’s really no different than any newspaper.  Just big and financially successful.

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

It does bespeak a certain insecurity, doesn’t it?

(It also introduces a conundrum:  which do more hope to see crash and burn?  Facebook or Twitter?)

Donald Trump on handling the national debt:

“This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money. I hate to tell you. So there’s never a default. But the point is it was reported in the New York Times incorrectly,” he said, referring to a critical Times article that ran on Friday.

And before you Democrat commenters start giggling too hard?  Bernie Sanders says the same thing – and Hillary doesn’t say it, but practices it anyway.

There.   Now that I have your attention…

While I’ve always run a forthrightly ideological conservative blog (that also covers music, history, and pretty much any other subject I want to cover), I’ve also always sought to facilitate a lively discussion in my comment section – one that crosses the proverbial aisle.  That has been my policy since I first figured out how to add comments to this blog, back in 2003 or so.

I italicize the word discussion because that is literally what I’m shooting for; people from all different angles of a subject, going at it, pretty much untrammeled.  Let’s face it – vigorous agreement is just another term for “echo chamber”; a good donnybrook is a chance to convince others.  Or even me – lotsa luck.  Some of this blog’s most celebrated commenters – I’m looking at you, Angryclown – could be fairly called “the opposition” in this space.

And that’s a good thing.

A good discussion  is kind of a rare thing in the world of blogs, these days; most blogs either farm their comments out to a turnkey service in which they participate only rarely (like Hot Air or Powerline), or control access veeeeeery carefully (Sally Jo Sorenson at Bluestem Prairie, who blocks many/most critical comments, and holds most all comments until she can respond), or just block everyone that annoys them (pretty much name any left-leaning MN blogs).

For over a decade, I’ve tried, and succeeded, in focusing my comment section on being a discussion.  In all that time,I’ve rolled out the welcome mat to all, pretty much without exception; I’ve kept to my policy of only blocking people who write things that could get me in legal trouble (two commenters, ever) or people who feel like exercising personal pissing matches with me  – three of them bordering on stalking – to an extent where there was no redeeming value to the “conribution” they made.

But while I feel no desire to change my policy, I’m going to say this; I did not start my comment section as a place for people to do the rhetorical equivalent of leaving a bag of flaming dog poo at my door, ringing the bell and running.

If you make a continuous practice of dumping contentious comments and running, week in, week out, then you’re treating the comment section more like your personal blog.

And since a blog takes literally two minutes to set up, there’s no real reason for you to do that – or for me to host it.

I don’t care if you refer people back to your personal blog (or facebook page, or twitter feed) as much as you want.  Go for it!   That’s how all of us created traffic when we were getting started!  But if you’re dumping a bunch of content here without actually discussing it with, at the very least, me – the person hosting your little outburst – then we’ll need to have a word.

Pet owners demanding “Paw-Ternity” leave.

Money quote:

 I couldn’t help but think that, just as Jameson was getting used to me, he feared I, too, was abandoning him. The guilt continues today: While my co-workers with kids walk out the door at 6 p.m., no one seems to care that I also have a child at home waiting for dinner.

You don’t have a “child” at home waiting for dinner.  You have a pet.  An animal whose instincts amply suit it to survived without “mom” juuuuuust fine.

Y’know where you teach your (two-legged) children not to mock people who look, think, act or believe differently than them?    Let’s all make an exception for people who think pets are “children”.

(And if the free market can afford to pay for “paw-ternity” leave, I’m all for it.  But you just know this is going to become yet another government mandate, don’t you?)

Last week, I bagged on Senator Ron Latz for – forget manners for a moment – lying about gun crime in Minnesota.

To readers of this blog, it’s no surprise that it was, to a geometric point, baked monkey doodle – so much so that an entire catagory on this blog is dedicated to their serial fabulism.

It’s from the top down, of course:

Our postmodern president, a good friend of mine points out, has proved that facts don’t matter. The weakest economic recovery in post-World War II history has been sold as a rousing success.

We increased our troop levels in Iraq, but miraculously we still don’t have any “boots on the ground.” The man who told his supporters, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” was sold to America by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the networks as a post-partisan—one who somehow found a way to blame Republicans for all the country’s ills. Obama also showed that bullying the Supreme Court—calling them out for their Citizens United decision in a State of the Union address—could pay dividends down the road. An intimidated Chief Justice John Roberts used pretzel-like logic to redefine the Obamacare mandate as a tax, though the administration had insisted that it was nothing of the kind.

What is it called when “fact-checking” exists to support factlessness?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Killing a police officer could become a hate crime. That’s a bad idea that is part of a larger trend of bad ideas. Punishment should depend on the act, not the motivation. I oppose the law.

Criminal law is intended to deter bad acts. Swift and certain punishment of the first bad actor will deter others from committing that bad act. Anything that makes swift and certain punishment less likely diminishes the disincentive and thereby weakens the overall purpose of criminal law.

Example: Street Thug A shoots and kills a police informant. Street Thug B shoots and kills a plainclothes undercover police officer. Why should Street Thug B’s crime be worse than Street Thug A’s crime? Murdered is murdered. How will adding an extra year to the sentence deter Street Thugs from shooting people?

Hate crime laws put the jury in the position of divining what was in a person’s heart at the time of the crime. “Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men?” is a catch phrase for a vigilante, not a blueprint for justice.

Even worse, the notion sets some classes above others for arbitrary and political reasons which leads to rent-seeking and long-term fragmentation of society into special interest groups clawing to be above each other in the hierarchy of rights and punishments. In ancient times, a Lord could kill a Commoner by paying a nominal fine, but a Commoner who killed a Lord was tortured to death. America was specifically intended to put a stop to that. Hate crime legislation is a step backwards in time, it sends us in the wrong direction.

Joe Doakes

But it makes someone feel good.

Which is becoming our new legal standard.

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?  The Party after Trump.

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:

• 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!

Walter Hudson says if there’s to be a civil war in the GOP, let’s fight it to win:

hat said, the risk of a general election loss was first assumed by embracing Trump to this point. As our nominee, Trump will decimate what remains of our credibility. Our candidates up and down the ticket will be saddled with his horrendous personal behavior and called upon to answer for his irresponsible rhetoric. Efforts at developing new constituencies and expanding the base to suit rapidly shifting demographics will wither and die. Trump will further homogenize and calcify a party which needs now more than at any other time in its history to diversify and grow.

The only way to mitigate the damage Trump will cause, and repair the damage already done, will be for Republicans to oppose him as Republicans. We have to lay claim to our party and reject him as its standard bearer. We have to present a contrast, from within the party, to his vile persona and unprincipled authoritarian agenda. That means stepping outside our comfort zone, defying conventional expectations, and ruffling more than a few feathers.

The whole thing is worth a read.

As far as I’m concerned?

I grew up reading stories like “Endurance” (30 guys surviving on an ice floe for over a year, before rowing lifeboats across the subarctic South Atlantic to safety), and “Escape from Sobibor” (people escaping an extermination camp and surviving in the woods until liberation came) and “Rickenbacker” (surviving on a raft in the Pacific for three weeks) and “Alive” (people surviving in the Andes after a plane crash). Non-fiction, by the way.
Those are the stories I’ve kept in my mind as I’ve gone through some of my life’s own travails (and I’ve had some doozies – but nothing like the above. Which is, of course, the point).

The Trump “Crisis” and the battle for the soul of the GOP? Pffft. Bring it.
I’m not going to theatrically pack up and leave the GOP. Partly because I (and many people much better than I) have worked too hard to bring the MNGOP a long way from where it was a generation ago. Don’t believe me? Check out Arne Carlson’s and Dave Jennings’s budget numbers, and then let’s talk. It’s not changed enough, fast enough, but it’s changed.

And partly because I did it once. I left the GOP in disgust in 1994, and went to the Libertarians. The Libertarian Party is a clown car. It will never get anyone elected to office. It *can* never get anyone elected – because it is a glorified frat party that exists mostly to purity-test each other to a fine sheen. They can’t even run a state convention, much less a government (and they’ll say “that’s the point!”, and they’ll be correct, but not the way they think they are). And libertarianism is a lovely philosophy, which at its logical conclusion depends on a complete suspension (or ignorance) of human nature. It’s no less a fantasy world than “democratic socialism” is. I’ll write in my dog before I vote for a Libertarian.

Anyway – I’m coming around to Walter’s point of view. Give it a read.

AKA:  Why SITD Is Better Than “This Week Tonight”

On his de facto “Daily Show” spinoff, John Oliver took twenty looong minutes to work up to his big scoop about Donald Trump; the big conclusion of his long, sometimes incisive, long, sometimes interesting, long, long bit on Trump was…

…his family name was originally “Drumpf”.

All that build-up to mock an ancestral name.

Huh.

I raise John Oliver the following:

trumpery – noun trum·pery \ˈtrəm-p(ə-)rē\
Definition of trumpery
1 – a : worthless nonsense.  b : trivial or useless articles :  junk <a wagon loaded with household trumpery —
2 – archaic : tawdry finery

Berg, win.

(Via my high school and college classmate Eric D)

The Second Amendment shouldn’t cover self-defense, says a typical “progressive”, because it violates the accused’s right to a trial.

The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.

Which I’m sure will be important, after you are DEAD.

The American left – where the right to a trial is more important than the right to live (presuming you’ve been born at all).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s baseball season, time for the professional complainers to start whining about sports team names.  I have a suggestion – change them all to Sox.

 Baseball teams traditionally wear tall leggings.  We already have the Red Sox and the White Sox.  Change every team to Sox.

 ROY-G-BIV won’t get you very far, there are too many teams.  That’s okay, have contests to let the fans choose their new team name, maybe something linked to their location or history.

 Atlanta – Georgia – Peach State – obviously, they become the Peach Sox.

 Phoenix – desert – they become the Hot Sox.

 San Francisco – gay rights – Fabulous Sox (team color becomes lavender).

 Texas – everything is bigger – Big Sox.

 Minnesota – Twins – identical – Matching Sox. 

 Detroit is tough.  Their water is poisoned – Dry Sox?  Their infrastructure is in ruins – Wrecked Sox?   They seek a federal bailout – Need Sox?  The town is run by Democrats – Your Sox?  Tough one.  Besides, why does a town that has no running water need a baseball team?  Move them to somewhere prosperous and call them the Silk Sox.

 Or we could just ignore the whiners and get on with life. 

  Joe Doakes

Cleveland could be the Buckskin Sox.