Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The military is the smallest it’s been since WW II which makes sense as the Founders feared a standing army would become a tool to oppress the citizens and there is no threat to the United States that would justify maintaining one.

 So why is our military engaged in so many wars around the globe?  Aside from Afghanistan, we also have boots on the ground in the Middle East and in Africa.  What national security interest are they defending?  Why not pull them out, bring them home, stand them down?

 Joe Doakes

Dunno.  Ask the guy with the Nobel Peace Prize.

The progressive chattering classes are all in a tizzy because many of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees are long-time opponents of the departments they’ve been chosen to lead:

• Rick Perry at Energy – who has advocated disbanding the entire department and reducing a cabinet seat
• Ben Carson at HUD, who has criticized federal housing
• Betsy DeVos at Education – a major proponent of school choice and degrading the government monopoly on education
• Scott Pruitt at the EPA, an agency against whom he’s spent years litigating
• Andy Puzder at Labor, who would oppose most “progressive” labor regulations
• Tom Price at HHS, who advocates rolling back Obamacare.

The chattering classes are all aflutter.  Perhaps because most of these departments are nothing but make-work programs for worthless Ivy Leaguer poli sci grads like, well, themselves.

Or perhaps because the American people might just support it:

And that leads us to the really burning question: Will anyone miss those departments if they go away?

We could try to answer that question by diving into the bitterly partisan political and economic debate over the size of government that’s been dividing people in this country since the days of Jefferson and Hamilton. Or we could wisely dump that academic argument and realize that the answer lies in how well the Trump team manages to make sure the changes get noticed by normal voters in a positive way. In politics, perception truly is reality.

And Trump, for all his faults, gets that better than most other Republicans.  For worse or, when it comes to slashing the size and power of the Federal Government ,much much better.

In New York City police precinct released this tweet over the weekend

From the top, The “arsenal” includes:

• A toy musket, complete with orange “I am a toy!” Muzzle cap.
• A BB gun.
• An airsoft “shotgun”
• A couple of martial arts practice swords, most likely plastic
• On the right side –  a garden machete, available for $10 from any Walmart or garden store.
• And, tuckedin under the butt stock of the BB gun? A single, tiny, 25 caliber pistol, very likely nonfunctional.

We get it – it’s dangerous being a cop.  Weapons in the hands of ne’er-do-wells are a bad thing.

But this sort of thing bespeaks one of two things:

• Cops who don’t think much of their citizens
• Cops who are trying to suck up to political leadership who doesn’t think much of their citizens, and would like to see them all “disarmed”.

You know what’s got my vote.

Dimes will get you dollars it fooled the average New Yorker and/or “gun sense” ninny.

:

…we’d certainly need him today.

All due respect to my Catholic readers and friends, but you guys were doing a whole lot better when you stuck with Italians and Poles.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Students in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare and replaced it with a portrait of that other one.  You know, that author whose works have passed-the-test-of-time, delighted billions around the globe.  What’s the name again? 

 Help me out here, it’s that famous writer.  The one you’ve heard of, whose books you read in school, everybody read them.  Dang, it’s on the tip of my tongue: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Twain, Hemmingway . . . aw, I can’t believe this, how could I forget? 

 Look, it’s the English Department.  They put up portraits of the greatest writers of all time just like the mural outside Barnes and Noble.  They’re the most influential, most enduring, the authors whose literature is literally timeless.  I can’t believe I’m blanking on this one.

 Shelley, Proust, Solzhenitsyn, Homer?  Agggh.  You know, the greatest writer of all time, obviously, since the writings are deemed worthy to replace Shakespeare.  Practically the foundation of the entire canon of literature in western civilization.  Way more well-known than that famous black professor who every cop knows on sight.

 This is so embarrassing.  It’ll come to me.

 Joe Doakes

Got me.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is in his garage, puttering with his snowblower. 

Avery LIBRELLE walks into the garage, drinking a bottle of kombucha.  

BERG:  Uh, hey, Avery.  To what do I owe the…

LIBRELLE:  I needed a place to throw the empty bottle.   Hey – Trump was elected by the Russians!

BERG:  Well, it seems that the Russians were trying to do something about our elections, via propaganda, and perhaps online skulduggery.

LIBRELLE:  It just proves that Trump was not legitimate.

BERG:  Well, I’m sure the DNC hopes people believe that.  But there’s no evidence they were doing it to benefit Trump, specifically.  More to generate chaos.  Putin is a former KGB guy.

LIBRELLE:  Don’t give me your crazy acronyms.  That’s racist.

BERG:  Whatever.  Intelligence people use chaos as a tool; out of chaos comes opportunity.  If an American government needs to use its poltiical capital fighting internal questions about its legitimacy – which seems to be Putin’s goal, and seems to be working so far, at least among our chattering classses – then it’s less likely to be able to intervene in Syria, or take serious action re ISIS, or marshal any political will to protect Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia.

LIBRELLE:  Bla bla bla.  America’s intelligence agencies say it’s a smoking gun!

BERG:  A smoking what?

LIBRELLE:  Oops. A smoking microaggression.

BERG:  No, they don’t.

(But LIBRELLE has already scampered away, leaving the empty kombucha bottle on BERG’s garage shelf).

(And SCENE)

“Living Wage” activists carp that without labor, there’d be no business.  To follow that logic, one would assume if you gathered ten drive-through and fry-line workers together, a fast food restaurant would spontaneously form around them.

Less facetiously, we note that a “marxist” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which promised “vegan, vegetarian and raw food” and promised no bosses or managers and a “Living wage” for its employees collaborators, has closed.

Worse still, while the food earned Bartertown a spot on VegNews’s “10 Hot New Vegan Restaurants” list, customers complained that it was almost impossible to get a meal at the diner.

People frequently noted on the restaurant’s Facebook page that they waited more than 40 minutes for a sandwich—and that’s when the diner was even open. Because the employees set the shop’s hours by group decision, the restaurant opened and closed at random times, leaving potential sandwich buyers totally confused.

Oh, don’t laugh.  With its minimum wage and sick time ordinances, Minneapolis is about to follow suit.  Saint Paul is rarely far behind.  And the only thing standing in the way of Bloomington following blindly behind would be the Mall of America – the only notable thing in Bloomington – saying “um, no”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

McDonalds is moving its world headquarters again.  Of course they are. Rich people are rich, not stupid.  Remember John Kerry parking his yacht across the bay to save half-a-million in taxes?  Same idea. 

The crucial point is that McDonald’s, the quintessential American success story, moved to Luxembourg to avoid the punitive taxation of the US, and now has to move to England to avoid the socialism of the EU.  Trump is correct about the need to bring those companies back.  Whether he’s sincere, and whether he can get any cooperation in Congress short term are big questions but not the biggest one. 

If you ran one of those companies, would you let yourself be suckered into trusting Congress again?

Joe Doakes

Congress is going to have to earn a lot of peoples’, and companys’, trust.

Not that you’d know if have a life, but Minnesota’s little coterie of gun-grabber groups had a “March” yesterday.

Of course, they didn’t march where the actual violence was.  They “marched” about the tony, safe fields of Boom Island, nestled into the upscale neighborhood across the river from Downtown Minneapolis; close to the killing fields of North Minneapolis as the crow flies, but still a million miles away.

The ELCA Hair was safely covered with hand-knit artisanal wool caps.   The orange Dreamsicle t-shirts were covered by more North Face on the “Marchers” than on the actual north face of any mountain in the area.

There was much misplaced bravado, at least on social media (“SEE YOU AT THE CAPITOL” indeed – but not for long, since not a single one of your bills will make it to the floor of the GOP controlled legislature, absent some hue and cry to do so – and the last election pretty well refudiated the notion  that there is any such hue and cry).

But there was one other “Marcher” that drew this blog’s interest:

It’s a Minneapolis police lieutenant (I won’t name him), wearing a Dreamsicle cap.

Leftenant:  you’re wearing a cap from a group that wants to deny a God-given liberty to law-abiding American citizens, along with your uniform and badge.

Does this give us some idea of the treatment law-abiding gun owners can expect in your area of responsibility?

I can’t imagine that this is legal, even under Janae Harteau’s special-interest-friendly set of policies.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen in Minneapolis who exercises your Second Amendment rights, be careful.

But you knew that.

During the 2010 Minnesota gubernatorial race, the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” spread a story – Target was “anti-gay”.

They weren’t, of course; Target has always been socially progressive to a fault; by 2010, they spun themselves into a fair tizzy over every PC fad that came along.  They still do.

But they’d donated money to the Tom Emmer campaign.  And Tom Emmer opposed same sex marriage – exactly as the majority of the DFL did, on the record, at that point.

And so the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” created a wave of “fake news” (and even more mangled advocacy reporting) to attack Target and Emmer.  Waves of paid and DFL-affiliated “protesters” descended on Target; after that, the media breathlessly proclaimed their campaign was having an effect on Target’s share price (it wasn’t) based on a report from a “progressive” fund that owned pennies on pennies on the Target dollar.    The media, played enthusiastically along, for the same reasons they did with Hillary.   In one cast, CBS news collaborated, willingly or not, with a local left-wing advocacy group to create an entirely fake news story.

The goal, of course, was to simultaneously attack Emmer and try to intimidate Minnesota businesses into not donating to Republicans; if they could cause problems for the mighty Target, what could they do to a machine shop in Owatonna?

So when Democrats whinge about “fake news” – they sowed the wind,

But did they reap the whirlwind?

Hillary is blaming “fake news” for her loss:

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said during a speech on Capitol Hill.

Some Democrats have argued the spread of anti-Clinton fake news online contributed to her electoral loss to Donald Trump.

Several problems with this theory:

• There was at least as much “fake news” supporting Hillary.  My social media feed was clogged with photomemes and phony stories from groups like “Occupy Democrats”.
• Beyond the purportedly fake news and “propaganda” epidemic, the mainstream media wallowed in a Pauline Kael-like echo chamber of pro-HIllary bias, to the point of publishing, well, “fake news” against Trump, to the point where the publisher of the NYTimes felt the need to publicly rededicate his paper to not doing the things that the media’s apologists say it never did.
• Not so much a “problem” but an observation; this is just another symptom of the cranky arrogance that helped Clinton lose the election in the first place; “If you deplorables weren’t so stupid, believing the wrong fake news, ‘d be in the White House again!”.

The mainstream media is less fake than “Occupy Democrats” – but it’s a matter of degree.

Berg’s Seventh Law is getting an epic workout this cycle.

Trump is no conservative.  He’s a big-government former Democrat who, previewed solely on his own record, merits and statements, looks as if he could be a bigger spender than George W Bush, if not Obama himself.

But his cabinet, so far, is well to the right of the Congress, which is moving to the right, but not nearly fast enough.

King Banaian pointed this out on the show on Saturday – and John Fund agrees, today, in NRO:

The biggest surprise Donald Trump has provided as president-elect is just how conservative a cabinet he is putting together. “This is a more conservative cabinet than Reagan assembled in 1980,” says Ed Feulner, a key Trump transition adviser. As president of the Heritage Foundation at the time, Feulner provided guidance for Reagan’s choices. The conservative cast of the nominees thus far is somewhat unexpected, given Trump’s well-known reputation as a non-ideological thinker who has often backed big-government solutions. Plus, Trump was a registered Democrat until 2009. Indeed, Trump’s entire family is largely non-ideological. It was only last August, in a meeting with New Jersey governor Chris Christie, that Donald Trump Jr. ticked off a list of his father’s new positions and said, “Well, I guess that means we’re conservatives!”

If they get through the Senate, it’ll be that rare example (as King and Ed pointed out over the weekend) of the cabinet being to the right of Congress.

And if they don’t?  It’ll be an epic chanting point for the 2018 mid-terms.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I was worried about a stock market crash in October so I got out of the market. 

Now it’s peaking, record highs. 

I’m not convinced anything has changed.  The fundamentals still feel phony.  It’s irrational exuberance.

Of course, I’m also missing out on the gains.  Time to jump back in?  What say SITD readers?

Joe Doakes

Open floor.

Brad Carlson is off on assigment this afternoon, so I’ll be filling in from 2-3PM.

Today on the show:

• I’ll congratulate Democrats on their sudden interest in election integrity and cybersecurity!

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!

Hope to see you there!

Today’s ♫ music playlist, including all of our “Worst of the Eighties” picks.  

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

Today on the show:

• In the first hour, I’ll be talking with King Banaian and Ed Morrissey about politics, current events, economics, diplomacy, and all but one of the other make-or-break issues of our time.
• In the second hour, I’ll be talking with King Banaian and Ed Morrissey about the other make or break issue of our time; the worst music of the 1980s.

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!

Hope to see you there!

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 call to early morning prayers (the fajr) had reverberated throughout Mecca on June 10th, 1916.  The modestly-sized city of less than 80,000 was only just beginning their day as Hussein bin Ali, the Ottoman-appointed Sharif of Mecca, strode to the balcony of the Hashemite Palace.

Despite the conflicts to their East in the Sinai and Mesopotamia to their West, the holiest city in all of Islam, home to the Masjid al-Haram or “Sacred Mosque,” had been remarkably quiet.  Most of the Ottoman troops stationed in Mecca had been relocated, leaving only a skeleton force of a thousand men.  A large military presence in the holy city, the site of the Prophet Muhammad’s triumphant return following years of exile in nearby Medina, was otherwise considered unseemly.

From the balcony of the Hashemite Palace, a shot was fired into the air.  As the echo coasted down the city streets, 5,000 men began firing upon the Ottoman fortresses that dotted the town.  Peering out from behind one of the fortress walls, the Ottoman commander quickly telephoned Sharif Hussein bin Ali – who was attacking them?  Both the attackers and defenders were flying the same flag of the Kingdom of Hejaz, the regional authority of the Ottoman Empire.  Were these attackers Bedouin?  Ottoman deserters?  The British?  No, Sharif Hussein bin Ali replied – they were his troops.

What would become known as the “Arab Revolt” had begun.  And the era of Ottoman control of the desert was about to end.

Arab Revolt – the romanticized view.  In reality, it would become a brutal conflict and one heavily subsidized by the British

In the summer of 1916, the dichotomy of the politics of the Arabian Peninsula were profound.  Nowhere else in the Ottoman Empire was a region governed by men so willing to rebel, yet leading over a populace so apparently disinterested in doing so.   (more…)

The WashEx asks if Trump is already president:

With weeks to go until he takes office, Trump’s moves have tested the limits of his unofficial powers as the president-in-waiting. And although his activism has drawn scrutiny from detractors, his favorability ratingshave hit new heights on the heels of several high-profile successes.

“I don’t think it’s normal for a president-elect to be out and about like this, but this is the era of Trump, and he is literally rewriting the rules,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist.

My answer?  Why not?  Obama’s been semi-retired for the past two and a half years.

On the one hand, it’s depressing that incoming college Freshmen need to be taught free speech.

On the other hand, at least one University president is doing it.  

BTW, Mitch Daniels 2020.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Dear Facebook Friend:

 When someone with a knife hurts a bunch of people in St. Cloud, you tell me knives are no problem.

 When someone with a car hurts a bunch of people in Ohio, you tell me cars are no problem.

 When someone with a gun hurts a single person in Chicago, you say we must lock up all the guns in the nation.

 I’m not seeing the rationale.  Is the real problem the tool used to do the hurting, or the people doing the hurting? 

 Are you certain we’re locking up the right thing?

 Joe Doakes

I think it’s mostly the liberal imperative to “do something”.

Although it’s pronounced more like “dooooooooo something” for full effect.

As the MNGOP rode back into a legislative majority on the collapse of MNSure, Donald Trump rode to office in DC promising to “drain the swamp”.

I’m not sure if the next GOP candidate for governor will make a similar promise.

But they sure could.  As Jeff Johnson points out in an op-ed in the Strib, the swamp – the cronyism, the incestuous DFL racket – is no less present.

In 2015, Dayton appointed the husband of his chief of staff to be the new chairman of the Metropolitan Council. Previously, the Met Council chairman position was part time and paid just over $61,000 per year. With this new appointment, however, the position was made full time and the annual salary was increased to $145,000.

Later in 2015, Dayton provided significant pay increases to his entire cabinet, most in the range of 25 percent to 30 percent. A salary increase from $120,000 to $155,000 per year was the most common increase granted by the governor. When both Republican and DFL leaders complained of these increases, Dayton called such concerns “beyond the theater of the absurd.”

Earlier this year, we learned that Dayton had quietly provided taxpayer-funded severance payments to several of his commissioners when they resigned from his cabinet. He provided more than $33,000 in severance to one commissioner when she resigned to pursue “a new opportunity,” $27,000 to another (whom Dayton appointed a couple of years later to another executive government position) and more than $18,000 to a third who had served in her position for only eight months before resigning.

Most recently, Dayton removed from the U.S. Bank Stadium board a member who has been critical of the chairwoman of that board (a Dayton appointee and his former deputy chief of staff) and the executive director of that board (a longtime DFL operative) both being paid by the taxpayers to do essentially the same job. Together, the two make nearly $300,000 per year.

The DFL has turned state government into a jobs program for useless apparatchiks.

It’s long been one of the Dems’ favorite – and most childish – chanting points to say that Republicans, being stodgy fundamentalist WASPS, want to make sex impossible to have.

If you follow Berg’s Seventh Law, you know the Democrats are actually doing something worse (or actually enacting the slur).

And you would, as always, be right.  

(And not for the first time).

Barbara Boxer is leaving Congress.

Unfortunately, that departure is a result of being feted at a retirement party, rather than frog-walked out of her office by the FBI.

But gone is gone – not that it matters much given California’s delegation.    It remains blinkered far-left, and is still home to some of the our worst Congresspeople, even absent Boxer.

Boxer moved to the Senate a generation ago as female candidates rode a burst of popularity, she noted in her official farewell address Wednesday. She departs just after the defeat of the first female presidential nominee.
She entered public life when it was considered a “noble” profession, she reminded listeners, and will leave just before the inauguration of a man who succeeded in large part by denouncing politicians.

The sooner that idea is mocked out of existence, the better we all will be.

Representing the people isn’t dishonorable.  Turning government into a cash cow for one’s self and one’s special interests is no more “honorable” than being a pimp.

My prediction – last week’s teapot-tempest about Trump talking with the Taiwanese president will redound to everyone’s benefit.

So far, so good:

But rumors of apocalypse were overstated. Beijing’s response, besides requesting that the U.S. not let [Taiwan’s presidentTsai Ing-wen pass through the U.S. in January on her way to Guatemala, has been muted. That is to be expected. China has more to lose than to gain from an overreaction. For Donald Trump’s domestic critics, though, the opposite tends to be true. It is a telling comment on America’s political Left that they have reacted more strongly to Donald Trump’s potentially “undiplomatic” phone call to the head of a vibrant democracy than to the regime in Beijing trying to crush that democracy. Visitors to Taiwan will find a fairly elected president, a vigorous legislature, an open press, religious freedom, the fifth-largest economy in Asia, and a unique culture that straddles East and West. A little over 100 miles to the west, visitors will find a one-party dictatorship, directly descended from the terrors of Chairman Mao, that “disappears” political dissidents and harvests the organs of Falun Gong adherents.

Selling out democracies because of a precedent set by one of our least capable presidents is incredibly stupid policy.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Levis bans guns in its stores  Doesn’t affect me, I don’t shop there anyway.

The reason is peculiar.  A person with a permit to carry had an accidental discharge in one of their stores so they’re asking customers not to bring guns into their stores.  “You don’t need a gun to try on jeans. . . it is with the safety and security of our employees and customers in mind . . . .” 

 If it actually were an issue of safety, then all guns should be banned, including cops (they have their own problems with accidental discharges).  But no, Levis is fine with cops’ guns, it’s only permitted carriers that are asked not to bring guns to the store.

 Will Levis install metal detectors to detect someone carrying a gun in his waistband?  Will they enforce the rule?  Nope, just announcing a policy that they request honest, law-abiding people obey.  Basically, they don’t want my trade.  Sounds as if I was right to shop elsewhere.

 Another thought, from a buddy who said: 

 Since the event that triggered this notion was somebody who had no place to safely store a firearm while trying on clothes, the responsible solution would be to provide appropriate gun lockers at the dressing rooms.  You know, like the lockers in jail house lobbies, where a gun is likely to be carried to that point but is not allowed beyond.  

 Sure, lockers would cost money.  But if this were a case of needing transgender dressing rooms, Levis would have built them already.  This issue is not a matter of cost, it’s a matter of cost-per-unit-of-politically-correctness.  There’s no convenient expression for that.  We know that 550 foot-pounds per second = one Horsepower.  What is a suitable expression to shorthand penny-pinching-virtue-signaling?  One Dickhead?  One Weasel?

 Joe Doakes

I think coming up with a measurement system for virtue-signaling would be an epic public service.

North Carolina congressman starts the ball rolling on carry permit reciproity:

Rep. Richard Hudson, R-North Carolina, says he is preparing legislation that would allow those with concealed carry permits in their state to cross state lines.

According to the Daily Caller, Hudson’s legislation would allow people with a state-issued concealed carry license to carry a handgun to any other state that allows concealed carry if the person is not banned from possessing or transporting a firearm by federal law.

For your less logically gifted liberal friends, what this means is this:  people who have proven that they have clean criminal records, and often training in self-defense law will have their carry permits recognized by other states, just like drivers licenses.  These are people whose crime rate is two orders of magnitude less than then general public; the record over thfis past twenty years, in every single state, shows that carry permittees are vastly, vastly safer per capita, than the general public.

Of course, the Dems will filibuster it in the Senate, if it comes up to a vote there.

Let them.  Record every worfd for 2018.   Non-urban Demcoxrats will go extinct.