Another episode in Texas last week of an armed citizen intervening in what police term a potential spree shooting.

One James Jones walked into the “Zona Caliente” sports bar in Arlington, got into an argument, and shot manager Cesar Perez,  killing him.

Then, a man – unnamed, except for the cops’ appelation “good samaritan” – with a carry permit shot Jones in the back an unnamed number of times.

Jones was carrying not one but two guns, one of them with its serial number filed off.  He had no carry permit.

The police were cautiously thankful, as usual in these situations:

“We’re thankful that the good ‘Samaritan’ acted quickly and decisively to end the threat,” Cook said. “We never recommend people get involved. That’s a personal decision that a citizen has to make.”

Use of force and firearms expert Emanuel Kapelsohn told NBC News that, from his understanding, the man who took down the shooter reacted appropriately.

“I think it’s to be applauded,” he said. “Not everybody in the world ought to own a gun. Not everybody in the world ought to carry a gun. Not everyone in the world ought to engage an armed criminal where innocent people could be potentially injured.”

“But this good Samaritan obviously had the ability to do what he did,” Kapelsohn added. “Who knows how many people would be dead if he had not acted?”

That’s twice in one week in Texas.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The spending bill doesn’t fund The Wall.

The Republican strategy appears to be “remove everything that might be objectionable to Democrats so we can get the bill passed and keep government running – otherwise, we’ll get blamed for the shut-down.”

That strategy is indistinguishable from “let the Democrats run the country.”

Look, there were a dozen Republican candidates.  Trump won the nomination on a single issue:  Build The Wall.  That’s his signature issue and it’s the only reason he’s President today.

The spending bill doesn’t have to cover the entire cost of The Wall – a symbolic down payment of even a lousy $1 would be enough to show he was keeping his promise to his base while rebuilding the military and draining the swamp.

If the Never-Trumpers in Congress won’t fund The Wall, President Trump should refuse to sign the spending bill.  Shut down the government and take the heat from the media.  Tweet everyday “Democrats willing to spend your dollars to kill babies but not protect children.”  “Democrats replacing Americans with Mexicans on your dime.”  “Democrats, party of KKK, still keeping Blacks out of work.”  “I earn a dollar, Democrats won’t let you earn that.”

Joe Doakes

All is proceeding as foretold.

Here’s the link to Cardiac Arrest by Howard Root.

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

Today on the show:

• Apparently Minneapolis has solved all is problems.
• What’s The Point Of A Majority
• And Howard Root joins us again.

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

With the collapse (for now) of the Democrat majorities in Saint Paul and Washington, and especially the election of a pro-2nd-Amendment president, with the concomitant appointment of a suitably pro-2nd-Amendment replacement for Antonin Scalia, the threat to our Second Amendment rights has ebbed just a bit.  The pace of gun purchases and carry permit applications has slackened a bit.  You can find ammo on the shelves again.  You can find a decent AR-pattern rifle for less than the cost of a quality handgun.

The immediate, existential threat to a right that separates citizen from subject has faded just a bit.

And it shows.

This past legislative session, with a bipartisan pro-2nd Amendment majority in Saint Paul, not a single gun bill advanced through the GOP-controlled legislature.  Two excellent bills – a self-defense reform bill (aka “Stand Your Ground”), which  would have lessened the requirement to be a lawyer to use a gun in self-defense, and a Constitutional Carry bill – stalled in the House.

Part of the blame rests with Senate Majority Leader Warren Limmer, who made it clear early in the session that he didn’t want to risk his one-vote majority on “risky” bills that would expose his vulnerable freshmen to controversial votes.

Four years before the next Senate election.    In a session where his Senators wijll be as far-removed from re-election pressure as it’s possible to be.

But OK – part of the job of the majority leader is to keep the majority; to win elections.  And part of politics is picking your battles, and drawing as few targets on your people as possible.  And the GOP in the legislature remembers what happened in 2012, when they overreached on issues that were much more vital to many constituents than they were to the rest of Minnesota.

So risk-aversion is understandable.  Right?

Yeah – but the Senate is hearing two bills on abortion restrictions that are going to draw Liberal Plutobucks and busloads of irate women in pussy hats to the capitol to vent their ninety seconds’ hate for weeks on end.

So the real question is, who are the real risks to the MN State Senate.

Judging by the legislation the GOP majority has agreed to work on, it’d seem leadership ranks those risks in the following, descending order:

1. Pro-lifers, who turn out by  the thousands for pro-life events at the Capitol, give until it hurts, and treat it as a life-or-death issue (as, indeed, it is) always.  No pause.  And who make their electoral muscle utterly nakedly visible every time they need to, by mobilizing money, volunteers, and (in most of Minnesota), decisive numbers of votes.
2. The DFL. 
3. Second Amendment Groups.  Because while nobody, but nobody, turns out the troops on the defensive like the shooters, when the alarm turns off, we all go back go normal, like the battle is won.  We don’t turn up for hearings.  We don’t donate money – MInnesota’s 2nd Amendment lobby has not one paid staffer; Everytown pays four or five people to organize the issue, full-time, in Minnesota alone.  The good guys?  All volunteers.  And volunteers burn out, need to find jobs, get families – they do all the stuff real people have to do.

The pressure seems off now.  But all it took was a decade of taking our eye off the ball in the seventies and eighties, and we very nearly lost the Second Amendment.  The game can turn faster than a late-inning Twins lead.

There is no relaxation when it comes to protecting freedom. And when politics is your medium, you have very few friends, and an awful lot of people who need to respect you.

And sometimes, you gotta give them a reason to respect you – if not your reason, then your power.

A regular reader writes:

A year ago, Slate asked if the civil war could have been avoided and went back decades before the war to point to events leading up to and potentially giving rise to the civil war, as well as potential ways conflict might have been diverted.
Today, I’m told that it is a stupid, crazy thing to ponder and that the civil war happened in 1861, not decades earlier.
I’m not excited about Trump talking up a pro-slavery Democrat. But, I think the Left’s reaction is funny.

In the late thirties and early forties, after the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov/Von Ribbentrop Pact, folk singer and communist Pete Seeger wrote a series of songs castigating FDR for criticizing Stalin’s new bestie Hitler.    Then, when Hitler abrogated the pact by invading the USSR, Seeger withdrew the songs from circulation – literally, asking fans to return their copies to the store – and wrote music praising FDR and the war effort.

If Big Left couldn’t flush it’s own past down the memory hole on demand, the entire movement wouldn’t be intellectually sustainable.

But deep down inside, I do in fact enjoy the fact that this story – about a blackshirt being beaten up by his fellow “progressive” fascists – includes the background fact that the blackshirts panicked and went into full retreat when faced with actual resistance from Real Americans.

More.  Faster.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This case turns on an idiotic interpretation of the statute which these three judges made, I suspect, because the judges don’t agree with the notion of individual citizens having a right of self-defense and therefore choosing to sabotage that right by intentionally being obtuse.

The case hinges on the definition of “carry” as in “carry a pistol in a public place.”  What does that phrase mean?  The court decided “carry” was not defined the same as the section of the statute right before this one, but instead was intended to have an entirely different definition in the broadest general sense to mean “convey or transport,” the same as you’d “carry” a bag of groceries from the car to the house.  Can anyone imagine them being as cautious, as restrained, as obsequious to Webster’s Dictionary, when deciding a gay rights or abortion case?

Everybody knows the way you carry a gun in the car when driving from your house to the shooting range is to unload the gun, put the gun in a case, put the case in the trunk, and drive to the range.  When you get there, you park, take the gun case out of the trunk and carry the gun case into the range.  That is the ordinary, normal, and perfectly acceptable way to transport a firearm.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re stone-cold sober or not: the procedure is the same.

Yes, technically, you have “conveyed or transported” a gun in a public place, and yes, technically, you did it with your hands so the gun is “on or about your person,” but until this case was decided, nobody would have believed you were “carrying a gun” within the meaning of the Permit to Carry statute. And it’s even dumber to believe there’s a distinction between carrying a pistol in this manner versus carrying a rifle or shotgun in this manner.

This ruling is idiotic.  The Permit to Carry statute was intended to make it easier for honest citizens to carry a loaded gun in public, typically in a holster.  Everybody knows that – it was endlessly debated; enacted and struck down and enacted again; and it’s been working just fine since it was adopted.  I suspect these judges simply don’t like the law.

Note well: this is a City of St. Paul case meaning the liberal Democrats running this city are ones pushing the judges to tighten and narrow and undermine the law statewide, using a pathetic excuse for legal reasoning.  Now imagine what they’ll do to you if you are forced to shoot somebody.

Joe Doakes

If the City of Saint Paul (and Minneapolis) can’t repeal the Pre-Emption Statute, they’ll undermine it in court.

From the email:

Mitch

I see that the Minneapolis park board has changed the name of Lake Calhoun to “Lake Bde Maka Ska”.

How in the flaming hootie-hoo is that pronounced?

Sincerely,

Woe-Begone

Ms. Begone:

“Bde Maka Ska” is pronounced “Betsy Hodges Slop”.

Glad to help.

That is all.

The city of Minneapolis is going to vote on whether to change the name of Lake Calhoun – currently named after John Calhoun, an ardent supporter of slavery.Among their top choices of new names:

10.  Lake Quetzl-Jambo-Wang-Tse (a perfectly-engineered word incorporatiing all indigenous traditions except English).

9.  Lake Julia

8.  Lake Grievance

7.  Collective Lake

6.  Lake Debs

5. Lake Marx

4. Lake Wobegone

3. Lake Castro

2. Gus Hall Lake

1. Lake Guevara

Votes in the comment section.

2% of US counties have 51% of the murders, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center:

54% of US counties had zero murders in 2014 (the most recent year for which national crime data is available by county.

69% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.

The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. As shown in figure 2, over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties.

m sensing a bit of a correlation, here:

2016 Election results by county

So it seems Democrat governance is correlated with death.

And – wait for it – here’s another correlation:

First, the good news:  Rep. Mary Franson has introduced a bill that would expose parents who subject their children to ritual genital mutilation to felony charges and potential loss of custody.  It’s currently illegal for a doctor to perform the procedure; if passed into law, Franson’s bill would spread the onus to the parents.

This is a good thing – especially if you are remotely familiar with the procedure:

Farhio Khalif of Minneapolis…described in horrific detail how she was forced as a little girl in Somalia to undergo a ritual mutilation.

Farhio Khalif, with Rep. Franson. Photo courtesy Tim Pugmire at Minnesota Public Radio.

“My legs were tied each side. My hands were tied each side. I was blindfolded, and the ritual took place and it was painful. It was so painful I think I died or maybe I passed away,” Khalif recalled. “I don’t know what happened. But I remember waking back up, and I see blood all over the place.”

And awful as that sounds, that’s really only the half of it.  The law seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

[“No-brainer” joke referencing Rep. John Lesch of HD 66A deleted – if only that were the problem].   Rep.  Lesch – representative from perhaps the least politically engaged district in the state, and a candidate for Attorney General – played for the cameras by…accusing Franson of playing for the cameras:

Despite bipartisan support for the bill, some Democrats suggested that parents could already be prosecuted without a new law…Rep. John Lesch, DFL-St. Paul, raised concerns that only Republicans had signed on as co-authors of the bill. Lesch said criminal law bills have traditionally been bipartisan.

The current law, to which Lesch and Somali DFL representative Ilhan Omar referred, makes abetting female circumcision a gross misdemeanor – like throwing a rock at a train.  Like, not really that much of a crime.

Several Republicans on the committee criticized both Omar and Lesch for questioning the motives of their colleague.

“This has absolutely nothing to do with the cameras in the room, with the headlines in the paper,” Franson said. “This is about saving children’s lives.”

With Lesch, and his bid for Mayor State Senate to go to Iraq Attorney General, it’s always about the cameras.

This needs to follow him through the AG race, assuming it actually gets to the starting gate.

A mass stabbing attack left one dead and three wounded at the University of Texas Austin.

It could have been worse, but…:

Eyewitnesses have reported seeing a student pull out a concealed handgun on the suspect, and made him back down.

While one can expect the UT and Austin media to downplay such a story – after they all doubled and tripled down against lawful carry on campus – this blog presumes the story true, and that the unnamed student is a hero.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New York Times opinion column explains why shutting down conservative speakers on college campus is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech.  The key is the kind of speech being shut down; i.e., speech that offends people.  This is not a new idea, it’s a bad old idea dressed up in fancy new credentials.

You see, some speakers say things that are simply is wrong, like denying the Earth is flat.  We know the Earth is flat, so we know the speaker is wrong.  We’ve told Galileo so, repeatedly, but he keeps speaking the same falsehoods.  Speaking a falsehood once is a mistake but repeating the falsehood after being corrected makes it an intentional falsehood: a lie.  There is no right to speak a lie.  Listening to lies and rebutting them repeatedly is tiresome and serves no public purpose; therefore, prohibiting the speaker from telling his lies is not a violation of his rights.  Free speech, in this analysis, doesn’t mean you can say what you think; it means you can say what I want to hear.

Milton criticized the notion of intellectual “safe spaces” being more important than freedom of speech when he wrote: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and un-breathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”  Areopagitica was written in 1644 but the battle is still being waged today.

In Liberal minds, you already are free.  You are free to criticize Trump in any way you choose.  You can express your disgust with Conservatives in words or gestures.  Your choice of interpretive dance to decry tax rate reductions will never be questioned.  Liberals will defend to the death your right to agree with the Narrative in your own special way.

Reminds me of a joke Reagan told.  The American says “We have free speech in America.  I can stand in front of the White House and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan.’”  The Russian replies: “That’s nothing.  I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan’ too.”  He still could, on any college campus.

There was an episode of The Prisoner in which The Village held an art contest, no limits, express yourselves freely.  Every painting and sculpture was an homage to the greatness of the dictator, Number 2.  Nobody thought it the least odd. It was completely sensible that they’d take this opportunity to express their love of Number 2 in their own individual way.

I wonder if modern Liberals could understand the joke Reagan told and that episode of the Prisoner were meant to be ironic, but Milton was not.  Is there that much learning remaining to be found on campus these days?

Joe Doakes

I was in a discussion about evolution with a group of liberals several years ago.  They were all demanding absolute fealty to the theory of evolution.   I asked why.  They responded “it’s just weird that people are allowed to believe things that are such nonsense”.

I replied “What difference does it make if the person refinishing your countertops is a young earth creationist, as long as your countertops get done?”  They phumphered something about it being important that people not completely “deny science”.

To which I responded “Science?  You mean, like brain surgery?   Something none of you “Science-based” people can do, but this utterly faith-based creationist has mastered?   Are you going to lecture him about science, or are you going to get your brain fixed?”

The response had something to do with me being a misogynist or something.

A friend of this blog writes…:

“We’re for wealth sharing and against white supremacy – But only on our terms. Followed this link from Minnpost.

How many tales of woe started with those five words?

But I digress:

 The biggest 2 complaints from this blogger seems to be that wealthy people are sharing their wealth to help the less wealthy and that parents of color are choosing to ignore what white elected people think is best for their families. I see nothing wrong with that. And I thought getting the wealthy to share their wealth and to have people of color reject white supremacy were liberal goals. So, every one should agree, right?

I checked out the link – and as I live and breathe, it’s our old friend Ed Levine.   Apparently he’s got some anti-charter school group – I’d guess some teachers’ union spinoff – to fund him, and I’d guess fund him pretty well; that’s a pretty slick website.

Since my kids finished high school, I have to confess – I’ve been a little lax in my coverage of the war on charter schools – but the DFL push to torpedo the lifeboats and push those kids and their families back onto the Titanic continues apac

Anyway, Ed – I know, right?  The nerve of those inner-city parents.  Who are they going to believe – the Teachers Union, or their own lying eyes?

…that morally-depraved halfwits would mock and taunt LGBT people with giggly impunity.

And they were right.

In one of the most glorious moments in the history of cable television, the late Christopher Hitchens told Bill Maher’s audience – basically the same species of smug droogs that dutifully clap on command, just like Jon Stewart’s and Steven Colbert’s and Samantha Bee’s audiences, and those at pretty much every other liberal Bread and Circus show.

SHOW MORE

Hitchens didn’t stanch the wave of smug liberals – indeed, they’ve only gotten worse since they’ve been relegated to the minority.

The left’s trait – condescend first (often, lately, by smugly wrapping themselves in a “scientific” banner that few understand and fewer still earn – has been most egregiously on display in last weeks’ flap over Bret Stephens’ apostasy on climate change.

David French on the Smug Liberal plague and Stephens:

Let’s be clear about what Stephens actually said. Here’s his summary of the current state of climate science: While the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. Here’s the translation: Science teaches us that humans have helped cause global warming, but when we try to forecast the extent of the warming and its effects on our lives, the certainty starts to recede. In addition, the activism has gotten ahead of the science. Indeed, Stephens even quotes the New York Times’ own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, who has observed that he “saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” Not only did the “hyperbole” not “fit the science at the time,” but — Stephens writes — “censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.” As if on cue, parts of liberal Twitter melted down. Stephens was instantly treated as, yes, an imbecile and a deplorable. Not only did the vast majority of commentators ignore his argument, they treated it as beneath contempt.

I have yet to have a liberal at any level answer this question for me:

Let’s say, for purposes of argument, that global warming is exactly what the Warmist faith says it is.  OK – so why is “turning the keys to the entire world’s economy over to the people who’ve made the Congo a massive lake of blood” the only possible solution?

I think i know – but I don’t think they do.

Liberals?  Sound off!

It takes an elite education to be this stupid.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Turns out my way of thinking is old-fashioned. I need to think like a millennial. I understand it all now.

The national debt is $20 trillion but interest on the national debt is only $200 billion, which is only 5% of the annual budget.

We don’t care about the total amount of debt. We don’t even care about the annual deficit, because . . .

WE CAN AFFORD THE MONTHLY PAYMENTS.

That’s literally The Plan for running the nation. Just keep running up debt to buy what we want, and make the minimum monthly payment.

But why stop there? Why make the payment at all? Why have student loans – just make college free. Why have FHA loans – just make houses free. Government pays for everything, add it to the debt, make the minimum monthly payments.

Why go half-way? Go all the way!

Joe Doakes

It’s the “Everyone’s pal from college who just kept on running up new credit cards” theory of budgeting.

Someday – five years?  Five generations? – some government will treat “reversion to a barter economy” as “everything is free!”.

SCENE:  Mitch Berg is picking through a bin of “Priced To Move” CDs at a “Half Price Books” when Avery LIBRELLE notices him, and slowly tiptoes up on him from behind.

BERG:  Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE:  Er…OK, Merg, how did you know I was here?

BERG:  (not looking up from the CD bin)  It’s the same expository plot device Mitch always uses for these bits.  Your surprise me at some location where I can’t tactfully get away without dropping a smoke grenade.  So – what can I do for you?

LIBRELLE:  Donald Trump is sucking up to fascists.

BERG:  (Finding a CD of “The River”)  What, again?  Do tell.

LIBRELLE:   He’s invited loose cannon fascist Filipino dictator Rodrigo Duterte to the White House for a meeting

BERG:  (Visibly disinterested)   So?  And he was elected democratically.  He’s not a dictator until he suspends Filipino democracy.

LIBRELLE:   He’s cozying up to fascists.

BERG:  Would you prefer that the Philippines – tens of millions of heavily westernized people, a growing economy, a key military position on the PacRim, and a long time ally of the United States – fall into the Chinese orbit?

LIBRELLE:  But Duiterte is an awful man!

BERG:  He’s a democratically elected leader.  And sometimes you make common cause with awful people to solve more important goals.  Like containing China.

LIBRELLE:  We can’t condone extremists like Duterte!

BERG:  His “extremism” is a matter for the people of his country to ascertain.  And containing Chinese expansionism is for us to do.

LIBRELLE:  You know who Duterte sounds like?

BERG:  Melissa Click?

LIBRELLE:  (Stops, stares, puzzled into space, slowly walks away)

BERG:  See ya.

And SCENE

Yesterday, Ken Martin – the Chairman of the MNDFL – posted one of his giggly little “gotcha” posts about a fairly loathsome Facebook post made on the 7th CD GOP page.  In the post, he took a swipe at new MNGOP chair Jennifer Carnahan.

Because that ‘s what politics is to Ken Martin.

Little did Ken Martin know…

…well, much of anything.  Martin has never been anything but Alida Messinger’s gimp.

But in this case, he also didn’t know that Chairwoman Carnahan had already pretty much eviscerated the Facebook post and the posters, nearly half an hour earlier.

Ken Martin; he’s not very sharp, but pass the beer nuts.

Bit by bit, some liberals are getting it.

John Kass at the ChiTrib?  He seems to have figured out the Big Lie of the Big Left:

The lie we were told as kids was this: The end of American liberty would come at the hands of the political right.

Conservatives would take away our right to speak our minds, and use the power of government to silence dissent. The right would intimidate our teachers and professors, and coerce the young.

And then, with the universities in thrall, with control of the apparatus of the state (and the education bureaucracy), the right would have dominion over a once-free people.

Some of us were taught this in school. Others, who couldn’t be bothered to read books, were fed a cartoon version of the diabolical conservative in endless movies and TV shows.

Best bad example?  Every episode of Law and Order after about season 5.

The most entertaining of these were science fiction, sometimes with vague references to men in brown shirts and black boots goose-stepping in some future time.

…

But the lie is obvious now, isn’t it?

A lie – and a Berg’s Seventh Law invocation.

Because it is not conservatives who coerced today’s young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak.

The left did all that.

It’s there in front of you, the thuggish mobs of the left killing free speech at American universities. The thugs call themselves antifas, for anti-fascists.

They beat people up and break things and set fires and intimidate. These are not anti-fascists. These are fascists. This is what fascists do.

We have not just one, but two generations of people who think 1984 is about the right, and who think they’re Winston Smith.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Reading a book from 2004 called “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs, who has written about culture and cities and societal change.

When it was written, everybody assumed the house price bubble would never burst.

When it was written, everybody assumed that if the house price bubble did burst, the market would quickly correct itself making housing more affordable.

Nobody saw the endless string of stimulus packages and interest rate cuts to bail out foreign banks hoping to keep home prices propped up for a decade.

A whole string of public policy recommendations turned out to be based on bad assumptions.  We see it now, of course.  But at the time . . . .

So: what bad assumptions are we using today as a basis for public policies which, in 15 years, will have people shaking their heads saying “What a bunch of idiots”?

Joe Doakes

Mitchketeers?  Go to it!

Today is International Victims of Communism Day.

And we need to really push this one, because it’s direly needed.

In an infamouis 2016 survey of millennials:

• 32% of Millennials thought George Bush killed more people than Stalin
• 42% didn’t know who Mao Zedong was
• 37% thought  Lenin was the good guy.

By all rational accounts, Communism has been the greatest human disaster ever to befall mankind.  Greater than Naziism, which is the only accessible yardstick.   Nothing else in human history is even close.

And yet at any gathering of Millennials, you’ll find a bobblehead in a Che t-shirt, and a few more parroting the Bernie-Bro platitudes that are Communism’s entry level drug.

Maybe it’s time to crowd-source a production of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

On Friday, in discussing the brouhaha over the Big Lake High School Trap team, I noted that “Protect” Minnesota, the habitual liars who lead Minnesota’s gun-grabber movement, disavowed one of their own oranization’s facebook posts.  This is merely the most ridiculous in a long pattern of such japes by the organization and its leader, the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence.

As if on cue, they sent out an email blast on Thursday:

I internally started a retraction countdown timer.

Was I disappointed?

You’ve actually read this blog, haven’t you?  Of course not.  It took 27 hours before this crossed:

It seems this sort of thing happens with every single email that the Reverend Nord Bence sends. 

So – not only has “Protect” Minnesota never, not once, made a substantial, original, true statement about the gun issue, but they’re approaching zero in statements about their own organization.

The media uses them as credible sources on this issue precisely why, again?