Today’s ♫ music playlist

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• The top 11 stories of 2016 – because our shows go to 11.
• A look ahead to 2017.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard on “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!

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few weeks/months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

The town of Kostiuchnówka had already seen heavy fighting for nearly a year when the first hits of Russian artillery landed on July 4th, 1916.  The town, located in Austrian occupied Russian territory (now, modern Ukraine), had been part of the frontline that was the Eastern Front since the massive Central Powers’ victory in the summer of 1915.  Now, Kostiuchnówka was again an active battlefield as part of the Russian Brusilov Offensive.

The attack had unfolded as most of the attacks during the offensive – a brief artillery barrage followed by seasoned Russian troops putting pressure on the entire front, hoping to form a crack and exploit the advantage.  26,000 Russians were prepared to assault Kostiuchnówka.  Only their opponents weren’t the usual mixture of men from the Dual Monarchy.

Many of the 5,500-7,300 men facing the Russians had recently been Russian nationals themselves.  The men of the Polish Legion, led under Józef Piłsudski, weren’t merely fighting for Berlin or Vienna’s claims on Tsarist Russia, but for a renewed homeland for themselves.  As Pilsudski’s men fell, the seeds for the short-lived Kingdom of Poland were being planted.

Russian pro-Polish propaganda – the Russians tried to keep Poles from rebelling, as they had four other times since 1830

Despite the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth being one of the largest nation states in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, Poland had usually been at the mercy of their neighbors.  By the summer of 1916, Poland had ceased to exist for more than 120 years following the nation’s division between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary.  Yet the potential future of a Polish state was very much on the minds of the country’s long-past conquerors.    (more…)

…who wonders if all of this hysterical angst from the Left about having to share a democracy with people who disagree with them isn’t just an epic practical joke?

Like, the entire American left (or at least those that pull their intellectual strings) playing a huge joke on all of society?   Like, Ashton Kutcher is going to go on all six networks (counting Univision) and say “Dudes and Dudettes, you’ve been punked?”

I mean, reading this little tirade, it seems more and more plausible.   This person just can’t be for real.

Help me out, people.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My Facebook friends are still losing it about Trump.  Now the persistent theme is that his Cabinet appointments are rich people who know nothing about their departments; or worse, they do know something but it’s the wrong thing.

 The woman appointed as Secretary of Education sent her kids to private school.  So that means she knows nothing about public schools?  No, dummy, it means she could see what a complete disaster public schools are so she pulled her kids out to give them a chance at a decent education.  She’s taken the top education job to try to reform public education into what private education already is.

 The guy in charge of the Labor Department opposes the minimum wage.  Yeah, him and every other competent economist.  So what’s your complaint: he has a brain and isn’t afraid to use it? 

 The Marine we just put in charge of the military isn’t sensitive, he’s confrontational.  Oh for crying out loud, confrontation is the whole point of a War Department.  Those aren’t all “participation ribbons” on his chest: at least one is an award for heroic bravery in combat.  That’s the kind of leadership the military desperately needs nowadays.

 For all the whining and complaining, nitpicking and second-guessing, the issue still comes down to the same issue that decided the election.  Is he Hillary yet?  No?  Still not Hillary?  Okay, good to go.  Carry on.

 Joe Doakes

And to the left, the question is, “is he appointing liberals, after having beaten them?”

In the TV series MASH, there was an episode featuring a statistician – an Army officer who predicted how many men would be killed or wounded given the parameters of an upcoming battle.    To the statistician character, it was all about numbers – “just business, nothing personal”, to invoke a line from a different seventies production.  To surgeon Hawkeye Pierce, the character who had to try to patch together the actual men behind the numbers, is was in fact personal.

At the end of the episode, losing his temper at the statistician, after showing the geek through the operating room, Pierce yells “the thing I hate about you isn’t that you’re good at your job.  I hate you for liking it so much”.

I have a similar reaction to people who try to boil all human behavior down into numbers, statistics and analytical models.

If blogs existed 50-60 years ago, a story like this would be accompanied by a photo like this. Good thing this is 2016, right?

Now, before you launch into some misguided jape about conservatives hating science, remember – part of my day job is, well, boiling down human behavior into numbers, stats and patterns.  A bigger part, at least for me, is finding the qualitative answer behind the numbers.

But I digress.  Among the many joys of this past election – the potential for a safe SCOTUS, a solid cabinet, no Hillary, no leasing of US foreign policy to the Saudis and Qataris – was the complete collapse of analytics in predicting (and, via our media, shaping) this past election.

The ana­lyt­ic­al mod­els for both sides poin­ted to a Clin­ton vic­tory, al­beit not a run­away. The Clin­ton cam­paign and su­per PACs had sev­er­al of the most highly re­garded polling firms in the Demo­crat­ic Party, yet in the places that ended up mat­ter­ing, very little if any polling was done. So while 2016 wasn’t a vic­tory for tra­di­tion­al polling, it cer­tainly took a lot of the luster from ana­lyt­ics. In the end, big data mattered very little.

While tinkering with stats can be fun, I’ve long loathed notion that all of human behavior can be boiled down into numbers.   And I’ll admit, the schadenfreud when the geeks fail to do so is glorious.

Apparently $1.1 Billion just gets you the stadium.  We needed the $100M Extended Service option, too.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember yellowcake? 

 The story was that intelligence agencies had learned Saddam Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake uranium to build nuclear weapons to use against the United States, which would have posed a threat to our national security, so we had to go to war against him to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction on us.

 The entire international coalition shared the intelligence evidence as did select members of Congress including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the war based on that intelligence assessment.

 Except – no yellowcake.  Turns out the intelligence was faulty.  Nobody should have relied on it, much less gone to war over it.  Bush lied, people died.

 Fast forward a decade.  Portions of the intelligence community believe Russia hacked into the DNC computers but portions of it do not, the evidence is unclear, the motive is unknown, the result on the election is impossible to prove.  But some idiots in Congress are ready to start a war over this?  And not just war with some two-bit tin pot dictator, war with a nuclear nation whose conventional military forces dwarf ours? 

Insane.  Literally, not sane.  Should be locked up as a danger to themselves and all the rest of us.

 Joe Doakes

Knowing some of this might come from reading military history.

But you can count liberals who read military history on one hand.

Allison Sherry added this opinion column – essentially, a piece of delated-PR for the Angie Craig campaign – in Monday’s Strib:

Incoming Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis made his career as a provocative talk-radio personality who seemed to relish holding court on the fringes of the political mainstream.

On any given day, he could offer up inflammatory comments about slavery or assert that unmarried women just want government to pay for their birth control.

Now Lewis faces the biggest test of his political career as he must rapidly transition from radio provocateur into a full-time member of Congress.

Sherry is a new member of the Strib’s ignominious “columnist’s row”, so it’s to be expected she’ll start her beat by reprising Angie Craig’s campaign chanting points – which the Strib considers “sources”, by the way.

Lewis seems to get it, though:

“I’m not an expert, though I played one on the radio for 20 years,” Lewis said in the basement of the Capitol complex, fidgeting with a bottle of water. “It is humbling and sobering when all of [a] sudden you see Rep. Jason Lewis on things.”

Ms. Sherry seems well fitted to follow in Nick Coleman’s steps.

In a more serious vein:  why would the Strib be running what is basically a hit piece on the new Congressman, before he’s even sworn in?

Easy.  Angie Craig is already fundraising for a rematch.  To the DFL and Strib, the 2018 race is already underway.

CORRECTION:  It seems Ms. Sherry is actually not a columnist, but one of the Strib’s reporters.

I regret the error.

To: President Obama
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:  Blame Where Blame Is Due

Mr. President,

Don’t mention it.  Any time!

That is all.

Say what you will about Russia and its history:  not good for the proverbial little guy, lots of death and misery, in a demographic death spiral…

…but if they do something well, it’s massed choral music.

And so I pay my regards to the Alexandrow Ensemble – known to generations as the Red Army Choir, during the Soviet era – whose military plane crashed in the Black Sea en route to entertain the troops in Syria.

As the big choirs go, they were bigger than most:

And the land of Tolstoy, Solzhenitzyn and Dostoyevskii writes even does jingo as an epic production:

RIP, Alexandrow Ensemble.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It might be funny to write a letter to the editor.

 I’ll claim to be a left-handed Black Transgender Lesbian.  The story will be about my struggle, how I was oppressed by Conservative teachers in college, passed over in employment so they could hire Whites, afraid to speak my mind at work because everyone there was a Republican and they’re notorious for being petty and vindictive, how traumatized I felt when Trump won and I realized my life was in danger.

 I bet I could get it published to rave reviews.  “So Brave.” 

 Then I’ll use the “find and replace” function to change “Black” to “White” and “Republican” to “Democrat,” change the whole thing mirror image, send it to the people who raved about the first column to see what they think.  My guess is they’ll hate it.  “Racist.”

 Can one person be both brave and racist?  Apparently so, if the analyst relies on the most superficial sorting.

 I could be a success like this guy.  

 Joe Doakes

To paraphrase PT Barnum, nobody every got their Letter to the Editor scuppered for not playing to the media’s prejudices.

I missed this one until I was reminded yesterday; 12/26 is the 26th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.

It didn’t really get headlines, did it?   That’s because the American Media / Academic / Industrial Complex bet on the wrong side.

The media has spent most of this past generation – a generation – pretending they knew it was going to happen all along; that the Soviet Union was a top-heavy planned nightmare that was bound to collapse sooner than later.  Which may have been true – but absolutely nobody in the Media/Academic/Industrial Complex predicted it beforehand.  Through the eighties, the usual suspects contended the Second World was a viable system; “Soviet Expert” Strobe Talbot predicted the USSR was here to stay as late as 1991.   They’ve also spread the fiction that the USSR didn’t collapse; it came in for a planned, soft landing, courtesy of Mikhail Gorbachev.    It’s nonsense, of course; Gorbachev was a symptom; the Politburo’s reaction to the gathering realization that Reagan was a different breed of President.   While America’s idiot “elites” still chuckle over the invasion of Grenada, inside the Kremlin it was another matter; according to Anatolii Dobrynin (as related in Dinesh D’Souza’s wonderful bio of Reagan), the backing up of a “red line” with overwhelming force rocked the Soviet leadership on its heels, and prompted a reassessment of the USSR’s diminishing options against a re-arming, determined West and an Eastern Europe that was roiling with dissent (supported by coalition of Western Partners, including the unlikely but effective alliance of Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, who helped funnel US aid to Eastern labor movements that led the battle against the communists).

How hard were the media pulling for the Communists?  In 1994 – barely two years after Russian troops departed Polish soil, when Poland had just spent all but 20 years of the previous several centuries occupied by Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Czars, Nazis and Communists – a short, sharp recession hit the emerging Polish market.  Tom Brokaw went on the NBC Evening News and said “Yut urpeers thut thuh Pawlish uhxpurruhmuhnt wuth thuh fruh markuht huhs FAYLed” (Translation:  It appears that the Polish experiment with the free market has failed”).    Love that double standard, doncha – Fidel Castro’s Cuba got a sixty year pass on the complete collapse of socialism, and Barack Obama is still blaming Bush for things – but Poland got a two year grace period from the media.  Fortunately, the Poles ignored Tom Brokaw, and built a solid, free economy.  (It was, however, the moment I declared personal war on the mainstream media).

Academia’s been worse.  American academia has been tending the collectivist, autocrat flame without a break since the fall of The Wall.

The Eastern Europeans – the hundreds of millions of people in the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Ukraine, Georgia, and others who started fumbling their imperfect way to freedom, sometimes haltingly, sometimes with detours, sometimes with roadblocks backed with Russian tanks, starting a generation ago yesterday?  They know better.

Reagan statue, unveiled in Budapest

They’ve dedicated monuments to Reagan all over Eastern Europe.

Reagan statue in Warsaw, redolent in the kind of symbolism Polish artists do best.

Statue of Reagan and Pope John Paul II at Ronald Reagan Park in Gdansk, Poland – which is on the short list of “fault lines that led to the collapse of the USSR”.

A Georgian man who used to sit next to me on the bus spelled it out to me; Ronald Reagan was, and is, revered in Georgia, for having “brought us freedom”.

Not Gorbachev.

Not Strobe Talbott.

Not random happenstance and a bad economy.

UPDATE:  When I say “the media”, I mean the mainstream one that’s still pining for those cool-lookig May Day parades.  Not the King Banaian Radio Show, which covered the collapse last Saturday.

The left-leaning mainstream media – which has in the life of this blog:

• embraced (and still embraces) a “fake” but “accurate” story about George Bush’s Air Guard service that sported faked documents and references to officers who had retired from the service by the time they signed the purported document
• Actively colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and is actively and quite publicly looking for ways to sandbag the incoming Administration
• Faked “research” about firearm defense, and done is so badly lil’ ol’ me was able to shred it by my lonesome…

…is wondering why people don’t trust it.

Perhaps because of paragraphs like this (emphasis added by me):

“What I think is so unsettling about the fake news cries now is that their audience has already sort of bought into this idea that journalism has no credibility or legitimacy,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a liberal group that polices the news media for bias. “Therefore, by applying that term to credible outlets, it becomes much more believable.”

Media Matters is a Soros-funded propaganda mill.  It is a “media watchdog” only to the extent that an attack-PR firm is a watchdog of anything; relentlessly scouring media for congruence with liberal chanting points with all the grace of a German funk band.

Others see a larger effort to slander the basic journalistic function of fact-checking. Nonpartisan websites like Snopes and Factcheck.org have found themselves maligned when they have disproved stories that had been flattering to conservatives.

Neither is non-partisan.

While I think good reporting is essential to a representative Republic, I think our current mainstream media will not be the ones to perform any kind of “good reporting”.   The sooner it goes out of business, the better for democracy.

Liberals; some of you really really really really really just don’t get the spirit of the holiday.

That may have been the most depressing thing I read all holiday season.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been seeing some particularly stupid articles arguing electors have the duty to vote their conscience, not their pledge.

 Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution provides that each state shall appoint electors.  How and who gets appointed elector is up to the legislatures of the states.  The electors meet in their respective states and cast their votes for President which are transmitted to the Senate to be counted.  This is a hold-over from the days when travel by foot or horse made national elections a logistical nightmare, but it’s still the law.

 Minnesota Statutes 208.03 provides that presidential electors shall be nominated by the major political parties at their convention and Minn. Stat. 208.04 says a vote for a presidential candidate cast in the general election is treated as a vote for the electors of that party.  When a Minnesota voter casts a ballot for Hillary, she’s actually voting for the electors appointed by the DFL Party.

 In 2015, Minnesota adopted the Uniform Faithful Presidential Electors Act to bring our law into closer conformity with the majority of states.  Under Minn. Stat. 208.43, electors sign a pledge:

 “If selected for the position of elector, I agree to serve and to mark my ballots for president and vice president for the nominees for those offices of the party that nominated me.”

 There is no penalty for refusing to honor the pledge.  There should be.

Minnesotans voted Hillary because, after listening to their speeches, scrutinizing their records and analyzing their promises, they thought Hillary would make a better president.  The law that equates a vote for Hillary as a vote for Pledged Electors does not authorize the electors to substitute their judgment for mine and instead vote for Bernie.  The electors are merely the messenger transmitting my decision to Washington.  We decide on the message.

 It must be that way.  I have no way to evaluate Muhammad Abdurrahman’s judgment and beliefs.  I never heard of him until he broke his pledge.  It would be insane for me to hand him carte blanche to vote for anybody he liked – that would defeat the whole purpose of having a general election.  Although it might make the campaigns shorter.  Under that system, you’d never get to see the candidates, never get to hear them.  You’d just vote “DFL” or “GOP” and the apparatchiks appointed by the big-shots in the smoke-filled rooms would pick whoever The Bosses decide to install as President – Hillary, then Jeb, then Chelsea, then one of George W’s girls . . . . 

 Joe Doakes.

My piece earlier this noon hour, about the complete collapse of Jessica Chastain’s anti-2nd-Amendment melodrama Miss Sloane, reminds me of a problem that’s emerged this past year.

Sloane was the second movie in the past 12 months involving an issue in which I’m fairly intimately involved, and that I’ve actually wanted to go to a theater to see (the other  was the hilariously-mistitled Truth, which passed unlamented by anyone but the left’s movie critics in the winter of 2015), albeit only at a second-run theater like the Riverview; I’m not gonna give Hollywood the satisfaction of paying full price to watch its propaganda.

Either, it seems, did anyone else.  Both movies disappeared from box offices faster than the Vikings left the playoff race.

The “problem”?  They leave the theaters before I can get around to going to review them.

It’s a smile problem, in the great scheme of things, but still.

Gun-control melodrama Miss Sloane has bombed at the box office.

Well, no.  That understates it.  Howard the Duck and Ishtar bombed.  Miss Sloane was dropped from a single B-29, and like that iconic single bomb, has a decent shot at helping to bring a war to an end.

After lavish television advertising – Miss Sloane had a bigger TV budget than the inescapable Rogue One – and fawning reviews from liberal critics and media, the movie earned $3.2 million dollars.  Which, divided by the number of screens and a $10 ticket price, meant an average of around ten people attending each showing.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying to get people to show up. Out of the 200 highest-grossing movies of 2016, only ten exceeded the $15.9 million television advertising budget of Miss Sloane, and seven of those did so by very small amounts. Miss Sloane spent more than the Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, Star Trek, Pete’s Dragon, Arrival, Doctor Strange, and Hacksaw Ridge. It had twice the advertising budget of such hits as Sully, The Girl on the Train, and The Secret Life of Pets. For every dollar spent on advertising, Miss Sloane brought in just 21 cents in ticket sales. By this measure, it came in dead last out of the 200 top-grossing movies in 2016. No one else was even close. Coming in second-to-last was Collateral Beauty, which made 53 cents per advertising dollar. The average movie made almost $2 for each dollar spent on advertising.

Of course, the movie’s core conceit – that gun grabbers are a bunch of plucky, underfunded underdogs, duking it out with a “gun lobby” that is floating in money – is a preposterous fiction.  Michael Bloomberg and other anti-gun plutocrats fund the “safe criminal” movement lavishly.

For example, here in Minnesota during the 2016 campaign, groups affiliated with the safe criminal lobby spent well over a million dollars – easily ten times as much as the Human Rights movement did – and employed at least four full-time paid staffers.   Not a single person in Minnesota is paid to lobby the legislature or organize the community; the movement is entirely volunteers, working on their own time out of pure devotion to the Bill of Rights.   In other states – Nevada, Washington, Maine – the spending ratio was closer to 30 to 1.

I suspect most Americans can tell the movie doesn’t pass the stink test;  Sloane’s premise reeks like a full pea-soup diaper on a dog day in the bayou.

And its failure is of a piece with the collapse, over the past fifteen years, of nearly every single Hollywood anti-war movie.

When I saw the trailer – during one of my ever-so-brief episodes of watching broadcast TV – I heard the trailer in the background.  I think it was the normally-excellent Sam Waterson, playing one of the “gun lobby” bad guys.  I think I envisioned a character wearing a black cape and top hat, twisting a painstakingly-maintained handlebar mustache as he tied Ms. Chastain…er, Sloane to the tracks.  I actually laughed out loud.

But hey, Hollywood; keep ’em coming.

Nicholas Frankovich on why “Happy Holidays” – regarded by so many Christians as a forced, PC bowdlerization of “Merry Christmas” – is a good and noble greeting.

Many good points – but I liked this one:

Recall that devout Jews kept a respectful distance from the Holy of Holies and that Gentiles respectful of Judaism kept a respectful distance from the Temple’s inner courts. Devout Jews to this day preserve the Tetragrammaton from contact with hand or mouth — and hence their references to “Adonai” (Lord), a hedge against the Ineffable, and “HaShem” (the Name), a hedge against the hedge. Recall also that the first of the seven petitions that Jesus formulated in the prayer that he taught his disciples, including us, is that the name of “our Father” be “hallowed.” Christians translate the Tetragrammaton as “Kyrios” (Greek), “Dominus” (Latin), “Lord” (English, with small caps in the King James Version), and the equivalents in other languages. “Throw not your pearls before swine,” the Lord teaches, meaning, among other things, “Be grateful wherever the character string ‘C h r i s t — ’ isn’t flashing next to underwear ads on Jumobtrons in Times Square.” Then redouble your gratitude if the word “holidays” enables us to smuggle into secular consumer culture a hint of anything like the transcendent. Most people now think of holidays as primarily days on which they don’t have to work, but even that much takes us halfway to the principle of the Sabbath, the very prototype of the holiday, or holy day.

It’s a good article, and you oughtta read the whole thing.

Here’s the rub; give me a good theological reason to prefer “Happy Holidays” – Frankovich makes a good case – and I’m on board.

Most of the kommissars of PC who are pushing the idea that “Merry Christmas” is a trigger are not making a theological case.   For better or worse, motive counts.

Nate Cohn notes why Hillary couldn’t reassemble the Obama Coalition:

It is entirely possible, as many have argued, that Hillary Clinton would be the president-elect of the United States if the F.B.I. director, James Comey, had not sent a letter to Congress about her emails in the last weeks of the campaign.

But the electoral trends that put Donald J. Trump within striking distance of victory were clear long before Mr. Comey sent his letter. They were clear before WikiLeaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. They were even clear back in early July, before Mr. Comey excoriated Mrs. Clinton for using a private email server.

It was clear from the start that Mrs. Clinton was struggling to reassemble the Obama coalition.

At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin. Mrs. Clinton was also not matching Mr. Obama’s support among black voters.

The one “down side” – I”m exaggerating – to Clinton’s loss as far as I’m concerned?

We won’t be able to test my theory that, had Clinton won, all the liberal money and media love lavished on Black Lives Matter would have dried up before Hillary Clinton left the inauguration stage, because the reason George Soros was pouring megabucks into BLM was to get black voters, who’d turned out in cataclysmic numbers for Obama, to take any interest in a geriatric white patrician.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mayor Chris Coleman is running to replace Governor Deer-in-the-Headlights, hoping to bring the same vibrant economy to the rest of Minnesota as he’s brought to St. Paul.

St. Paul is facing a $32 million shortfall after the Supreme Court declared its special assessment scheme was illegal.  Black unemployment in St. Paul is nearly 20 percent.  St. Paul high schools graduate 75 percent of their classes but only 38 percent of St. Paul students can do math at grade level and only 39 percent can read at grade level. I can’t find current data on crime and shootings – looks as if bad news isn’t published anymore.

I mentioned Ronald Reagan’s 1981 speech about the situation in Poland:

It’s as valid and important today as it ever was.

Anyway – Merry Christmas, all!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show – I’ll be doing a special broadcast, “Christmas in America”.  Hope you can tune in as you get ready for your family’s own celebrations.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM (although not, I suspect, on Christmas).

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!

Hope to see you there!

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is leaving Alary’s after a Bears game, when he runs into MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau.  Dressed in a hemp power skirt, her brunette-but-slightly-prematurely-gray hair cut into the style known as “ELCA Hair”, she is on her way from her Lowertown condo to the MPR building.  

SILBERMAN:  (In her “NPR” voice – a nasal brogue that bespeaks an Ivy League education, and sounds like it may have ironic clarinet music in the background) Mr.  Berg.

BERG:   Oh, hello, MyLyssa.

SILBERMAN:  So you’re still a Second Amendment activist?

BERG:  I am.

SILBERMAN:  And you oppose closing the “Gun Show Loophole” with mandatory registration?

BERG:  Yep.

SILBERMAN:  Why?  It’s clearly commonsense.

BERG:  I’m going to refute you with an NPR story.   Yesterday, NPR reported that the Obama Administration has done away with a 9/11-era program that allowed the creation of a registry of people from several countries linked to terrorist activities.   (BERG draws iPhone from pocket, shuffles through to find a recording).  I believe this the report, from NPR’s Tom Gjelten:

GJELTEN: Among those who would speak out – the American Civil Liberties Union. Hina Shamsi is the national security director there.

HINA SHAMSI: We would absolutely oppose this program. And as we have said, if this form of discriminatory registry is put in place, we stand ready to sue and to challenge it.

(BERG stops the recording)

SILBERMAN:  Right.  So?

BERG:  Listen to this next bit.  I’ll crank up the volume for a few parts”

GJELTEN: A new registry could bring out law-abiding Muslims. But human rights lawyer Banafsheh Akhlaghi says it would probably not reveal the would-be terrorists the government should be worried about.

AKHLAGHI: They aren’t going to voluntarily come into a federal building, give you their fingerprints, give you their name and their identity and allow you to take photographs of them. The good guys do that.

(BERG stops the recording again)

BERG:   So terrorists aren’t going to come in and register themselves…

SILBERMAN:   Right.  That’s absurd.

BERG:   Exactly.  But criminals – people who commit violence with guns?  They will come in and, in effect, register with a background check when they buy guns?

SILBERMAN:  You are clearly “fake news”.

BERG:  Clearly.

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We distribute computer information so a single crash isn’t devastating.  We distribute warehouses so deliveries are quicker.  We distribute police officers so criminals don’t have a safe space to operate.  Distributed transportation – everybody having their own car and good roads to drive it on – are what built America into the world leader in mobility and prosperity.

 Urban planners insist we should move to cities, live densely in converted warehouses, ride trains.  That’s essential to save the planet. The plan assumes the trains will run.  What if they don’t?  Then everybody is stuck, captive, held hostage to the demands of the train crews.

I vaguely recall America having this sort of trouble, years ago, employees essential to the national transportation system went on strike threatening to cripple the nation.  Seems to me Ronaldus Magnus handled that problem swiftly and decisively.  Might be worth looking into, Ms. May.

 Joe Doakes

In the world of the utopian left, nothing ever actually goes wrong.