I grew up in the middle of missile country; it was about 40- or so miles from my hometown to the nearly of North Dakota’s 330 Minuteman III missile silos.

Former Minuteman III silos in eastern North Dakota. These were all dismantled (actually, imploded) in the ’90s, as part of a nuclear missile reduction program with the Russians. The ones in the northwest part of the state remain.

And in my teens and twenties, at the height of the Cold War, I was genuineliy ambivalent about having children, ever, while the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war.

And after the fall of the USSR, in the early ’90s, it seemed we were on the brink of being past all that; both the US and Russia took their bombers off the alert they’d been on for decades, and began stepping back.

Well, nothing good ever lasts; the US nuclear force is stepping up its alert level again:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the US, we have flu season.  On Madagascar, they have plague season.  Yes, the Black Death, it’s a regular thing for them.  Hundreds have died already this year.

Can’t wait for the refugees to start arriving so they can be shipped around the country to share with us, the way that other diseases formerly defeated in America, suddenly are making a comeback.

When I visited my doctor last week, the receptionist wanted to know if I’d travelled out of the country in the last 21 days, where I might have come in contact with diseased people.  No, I haven’t.  But I did travel to St. Cloud, Frogtown and Minneapolis, home of large concentrations of Somali refugees, who have stunning rates of measles and tuberculosis.  If the concern is risk of contagion, foreign travel isn’t required.

Joe Doakes

The people who brought you the Green Line and North Minneapolis will figure it out.  Honest.

So the Supreme Soviet of Love’s first album, See Red, is off to the printers.   My son Zam – who’s in school for graphic design – did the front cover art:

So I’m committed now.  The album goes on sale on November 10 (I hope), on both CD and digital  download; with a little luck the “teaser” (they used to be called “Singles”), currently a song called “The Wonders Each New Day Brings”, should come out a week from today, if all goes well.

So – hope you can make it to the Release Party for “See Red”, November 12 at O’Gara’s in Saint Paul!

While MInneapolis’ mayor Betsy Hodges has spent four years diffusing her efforts over a bewildering jumble of social-justice virtue-signals, the poor woman will never top the list of “Mayors with Bizarre Priorities” list while New York’s Bill DiBlasio is in office.

Hizzoner’s latest target?  In a city with rising crime, infrastructure that’s crumbling faster than an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of Seven-Up, and a financial situation that is rapidly decaying, DiBlasio is…

…confiscating electric bicycles – which are booming in popularity, especially among delivery riders for stores and restaurants; they are in fact the most efficient way of navigating the most street-space-starved city in America:

On Thursday, de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city would start fining restaurants in addition to operators, expanding and formalizing a style of broken-windows policing favored by the NYPD, which has confiscated 900 e-bikes this year. His justification? E-bikes are “just too dangerous,” the mayor said at a press conference.

How dangerous are they? Nearly 70 pedestrians (and 13 cyclists) have been killed by cars, trucks, and buses in New York City this year. No one has been killed by a bicycle. As for e-bikes in particular? The NYPD has no data on e-bike accidents or complaints. Nor does the city have any information about how the crackdown affects restaurants or riders. De Blasio was acting on instinct: The crackdown began when a local cyclist, Matthew Shefler, called into his radio show to complain.

Slower, more expensive deliveries; more congestion; yet another handicap for small business, even the ones that don’t get fined.

Betsy has some huge shoes to fill in the “bizarre priorities” deparatment.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Those records of Bill Clinton’s meeting with Loretta Lynch right before she canned the investigation into Hillary’s email, the records that we insisted we didn’t have all last year and continuing through the election?

Just kidding.

Joe Doakes

Nothing wrong with that, nosirreebob.

Our bottom ten songs of the 1960s:

9. Honey (Bobby Goldsboro)

8. It Hurts To Be In Love (Gene Pitney)

7. The Beat Goes On (Sonny and Cher)

6. It Must Be Him  (Vicki Carr)

5. In The Year 2525  (Zager and Evans)

4. Reach Out Of The Darkness ( Friend and Lover)

3. MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

1. Young Girl (Gary Puckett and the Union Gap)

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!

Today on the show:

• In the first hour, I’ll be joined by Ed Morrissey and King Banaian to talk a little politics and economics.
• For a change of pace, in hour two I’ll be talking with King Banaian and Ed Morrissey about the worst music of the 1960s.

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!

Warehouse district “geek” bar Byte is closing next week after eight months in business.

And while restaurants and bars come and go fast, Byte had one feature that drew especial attention; they built their business model around a $15/hour minimum wage from the ground up.

And kudos to a company who does what they think is the right thing.  More power to ’em.

Problem is, they needed that “more power” more than they thought:

“While we have enjoyed a steady and loyal customer base, we’ve also struggled with getting the volume necessary to make our business model fiscally viable in this location,” the post said… [Co-founder Travis] Shaw told the Business Journal in Decemberthat the inspiration for Byte sprouted from their frustration of a majority of restaurant employees not being able to earn a livable wage. Byte hired around a dozen employees, each one making $15 an hour with benefits, plus vacation time.

“This was what motivated us to start out on our own,” Shaw said. “I’m passionate about food, but more passionate about the system and a business that can sustain its workers.”

Well, I guess your workers are going to have to “sustain” themselves, now, aren’t they?

Citycouncilbots in Ann Arbor, Michigan (motto:  “A Cold Portland”) take a knee during the pledge of allegiance.

Let’s break that down; in the “progressive” epicenter of a “progressive” city hose “progressive” voters empaneled a “progressive” city council to enact “progressive” policies, the “progressive” council got up in the middle of their “progressive” echo chamber in their “progressive”  one-party city and did this month’s favorite high-concept “progressive” virtue-signal to a “progressive” audience, under the flashbulbs of a “progressive” media.

That’s going out on a limb, isn’t it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State of Minnesota is suing President Trump for ending payments that a federal judge has already ruled must be ended.  Attorney General Lori Swanson’s argument: President Obama started giving us illegal payments and President Trump continued the illegal payments while Congress worked on the problem.  We budgeted based on receiving illegal payments.  To suddenly end the illegal payments would inconvenience us by making us live within our own means, so therefore we’re entitled to continue receiving illegal payments, forever.

It’s illegal to follow the law.

Joe Doakes

To be fair to the Attorney General, it’s how the DFL has handled budgeting for the past six decades or so.

A friend of this blog writes:

The title of this piece says a lot

The title: “Mayor: If restaurants can’t be ordered to use recyclables, persuasion is a lost cause”.

And it means exactly what it says:

Mayor Chris Coleman’s office and St. Paul’s Department of Safety and Inspections are showing little enthusiasm for spending another year encouraging store owners to voluntarily switch toward recyclable and compostable to-go food containers.

The city council voted 5-2 on Oct. 11 against requiring restaurants, convenience stores and other eateries to make the switch outright. Instead, council members opted to give city staff another year to help connect them to environmentally friendly container vendors.

Why, it’s almost as if free-market businesses, when given the “choice” over whether to cut their margins to little or no economic or environmental benefit, will choose “No thanks!”.

Which just frosts the city’s rice krispies (emphasis added):

But on Wednesday, DSI staff and the mayor’s office informed council members by email that after roughly a year of outreach, they would not devote another year of staff time to the effort without a guarantee that the new rules will be adopted.

You drown more flies with vinegar than honey.  Just look at Minneapolis.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is at the Saint Paul Farmers Market, buying pickling cucumbers.

He is surprised when MyLissa Silberman – National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau correspondent – walks up behind him.

SILBERMAN:  Merg.

BERG:  Oh, hi, MyLyssa.

SILBERMAN: Republicans are trying to destroy the free media.

BERG:  Er, what now?

SILBERMAN:  A Republican legislator is proposing licensing journalists.

The measure would require journalists — defined as anyone writing or broadcasting news for a newspaper, magazine, website or television or radio station — to be registered and fingerprinted by the police and vetted for their “character and reputation.”

BERG:  I think you missed the point.

SILBERMAN:  No – it’s right here:

Committing journalism without a license within 500 feet of school or on a school bus would bump the penalty up from a misdemeanor to a felony. Journalists with felony or domestic battery convictions would be prevented from getting licenses. And unlicensed people would still be able to engage in journalism on property they own or rent.

That’s some serious infringement of a vital constitutional right.

BERG:  Um, yeah.  I heard you report about that.  Problem was, you missed the important part:

State Rep. Jim Lucas, a Republican from the southeastern part of Indiana and a vocal critic of his state’s gun restrictions, drafted the bill by copying language from a state law that requires a license to carry a handgun in public.

With these laws proposed for journalists, Lucas’s measure reads like satire.

SILBERMAN:  What are you talking about?

BERG:  Lucas is satirizing gun control laws; making people get a permit to exercise an essential Constitutional liberty, and putting all sorts of restrictions on it that have not thing to do with either public safety or, in its satirical form, the news.

SILBERMAN: But..Trump!

President Trump, who has demonized the news media as “the enemy of the American People,” alarmed free-speech advocates this week by writing on Twitter that NBC News should be punished by regulators after the organization published a report that he did not like.

BERG: OK.  So?  Trump said things that make the media uncomfortable.  Big f****ng whoop.  He can’t enforce any of it.

SILBERMAN:  No, Merg.  I repeat:

President Trump, who has demonized the news media as “the enemy of the American People,” alarmed free-speech advocates this week by writing on Twitter that NBC News should be punished by regulators after the organization published a report that he did not like.

BERG:  Right.  You already said it.  He demonizes the media.

Thing is, this proposal – it’s not even a bill, yet – isn’t about “oppressing the media”.  It’s about pointing out the double standards of the left and media (pardon the redundancy); hawkish absolutists about the sanctity of the First Amendment, dilatory and fuzzy on the Secone.

SILBERMAN:  But that’s unconstitutional.

BERG:  How so?

SILBERMAN:   Were you paying attention?  He said:

President Trump, who has demonized the news media as “the enemy of the American People,” alarmed free-speech advocates this week by writing on Twitter that NBC News should be punished by regulators after the organization published a report that he did not like.

BERG:   MyLissa, it’s not about the media, per se.  Although the media is certainly focuses on it.  Because it seems that the only civil rights the media really gets exercised about are its own.  First Amendment rights of non-media people?  Second, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth?   Crickets”.

SILBERMAN: LIsten, Merg:  “President Trump, who has demonized the news media as …”

But BERG has already disappeared.  

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This article is an example of the Right trying to manufacture a victory.  The courts shut down the travel ban, repeatedly, until it expired.  If Trump attempts to resurrect it, we can bet they’ll shut it down again.  A victory would have been a ruling that he was right and the lower courts were wrong.

On the other hand, this is an accurate summation of the Left’s tactics: “In essence, elements of the “nonpolitical” branch are trying to reverse the result of the 2016 vote by denying the duly elected president the powers of his office.”  And they’re continuing to do so as Liberal judges issue nation-wide rulings that clearly stomp on Presidential prerogatives for the flimsiest of reasons. This ruling doesn’t change that but it does highlight the hypocrisy.  That never hurts.

Joe Doakes

Assuming anyone’s listening.

I ‘m shocked and a little depressed to see that Caleb Palmiter died over the summer.

“Caleb who?”

Caleb Palmiter has been in a “who’s who” of seminal Twin Cities bands-that-made-it-regionally-big-but-never-broke-out; a founder of the Jayhawks, Bash & Pop, as well as stints in the Mighty Mofos and the Magnolias.

I remember him best for  a couple of bands well before that; The Law and A Single Love, both of which heavily featured his quirky, claw-hammer finger-style guitar style that was too articulate to be Doc Watson but was simpler and less ornate than the obvious comparisons, Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler.  Whatever you want to call it – I’d catch every gig I could, entranced by his mesmerising guitar style.

Here’s a sample:  he was always this good:

He died of heart failure, says the Strib.  Decades of booze and drugs.  Same old same old.

And now I feel a lot older.

Austria elects a millennial immigration hard-liner in the race for Austria’s Chancellorship:

Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz declared victory on Sunday in the race to become Austria’s chancellor, becoming the youngest head of state in the West. The 31-year-old Kurz and the center-right People’s Party defeated the Social Democratic Party, which was the largest party in the Austrian parliament before Sunday.

Austria – a nation with about the same  population as Minnesota and the Dakotas put together – has been on the front line of Europe’s immigration crisis.  The rise of the Austrian Volkspartei  (Peoples Party) – which is called “far right”,- is not uncoincident with the rise of Trump in the US, and other parties that are demanding a very un-Euro, un-“progressive” approach to immigration in time of anti-western extremism.

(Here’s a take from the center-right German ˆFrankfurter Allgemeineˆ)

Maybe.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Suppose you’re a politician who accepts campaign donations.  Turns out, one of your donors is a bad egg.  What do you do with that money?

If you keep it, you are guilty by association.  If you give it back, the bad egg will donate it to your opponent to use against you.

“After the Las Vegas shooting on October 1, State Rep. Erin Murphy, a fellow DFL candidate for governor, called on [Rep. Tim] Walz to return the $18,000 in campaign contributions he has received from the NRA over the course of his political career. Walz agreed, and plans to donate the funds to a veterans’ organization.”  Nothing against veterans, but why them?  Why not victims of the Las Vegas shooting?

The Democrat National Committee received $300,000 from accused sex abuser Harvey Weinstein.  It will forward $30,000 of that money to Emily’s List (supports candidates who favor abortion rights), Emerge America (trains Democrat women for office) and HigherHeights (supports Black women running for office).  Basically, Democrats are forwarding the money to their own constituencies. Why them?  Why not a group working with survivors of sexual assault?  And why only tithe 10%, how is that enough to purge their guilt-by-association when others must return all the money?

If the money is so tainted that you are stained the moment you touch it, then forwarding the money to a favored group doesn’t cleanse you of the stain, it makes you a middleman helping spread the stain to others.  Either keep it or give it back, but don’t try to convince me that money-laundering makes you righteous.  That’s just insulting.

Joe Doakes

They’re OK with that.

Eagan has a new city logo:  a more expensive version of the old city logo:

[The old] symbol, a more realistic green tree outlined in black, was in use since 2004. It was sometimes compared to a stalk of broccoli.

Eagan’s new, non-cruciferous-vegetable-looking logo. $75K. Not sure if that included the new city font.

A prominent graphic designer who lives in Eagan, Allan Peters, designed the updated logo for $75,000.

But practice makes perfect:

The city is on its fourth logo since the 1970s, each featuring what the city called a “strong, independent tree.”

This is what happens when a formerly sensible suburb gets overrun by DFLers fleeing DFL policies in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but who bring their DFL politics with ’em.

…you realize that Social Justice snowflakes can’t even criticize fellow social-justice snowflakes without sounding like someone doing a hamfisted satire of social-justice snowflakes.

It’s getting to the point where satirizing overly-fruity academic writing is passé and redundant. .

NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch forced to move her family due to constant, legitimate death threats…

…from “Violence” activists:

National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch announced Sunday on Twitter that her family had been forced to move suddenly after she received multiple death threats from gun control advocates.

Loesch, a conservative commentator and syndicated talk radio host, followed the announcement of her family’s move by condemning the way politically progressive society has treated not just her, but conservative women as a whole.

There are two huge points here:

The threats from gun control activists is pretty much par for the course.  Even locally, some local “gun safety” activists like to spice up their social media interactions with weird, muted threats of mayhem.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America was great in the 50’s.

There were no Muslims in the 50’s.

To make America great again, we must be rid of Muslims.

Trump’s MAGA hat is secret code for genocide.

Teens who wear it are brain-washed haters.

America will never be great again.

Yes, Liberals actually believe that. They saw it on MSNBC, read it on Slate and heard Nancy Pelosi say it so it must be true.

That’s why kids wearing MAGA hats is a crisis.  Article quotes some Muslim soccer mom who’s threatened by the fashion fad, and rebutted by a 14-year-old kid who says “I don’t think of how my hat will offend people.  That’s silly.  I wear what I want because I want to,” which is the ESSENCE of freedom in America.  Too bad you don’t understand it, lady.

Joe doakes

Red America is living with LIvia Soprano. cultu

Ken Martin, chair of the MNDFL, has a tough row to hoe.  I gotta say, I feel sorry for the guy.

On the one hand, the NYTimes – the PR agency for the Democrats at the national level – released an article disparaging the blue-collar workers of northern Minnesota:

“[the blue collar guy the Times starts the interview with] drives to the mine in his truck, comes home and watches TV, and he doesn’t know this world exists,” says [retired Twin Cities real estate lawyer and environmentalist] Becky Rom, a 68-year-old lawyer who returned to her childhood home after retirement and now leads the environmental campaign

And…

“Resentment is the primary driver of the pro-mining crowd here — they are resentful that other people have come here and been successful while they were sitting around waiting for a big mining company,” [Rom’s husband, retired Twin Cities corporate lawyer Reid] Carron told me. “They want somebody to just give them a job so they can all drink beer with their buddies and go four-wheeling and snowmobiling with their buddies, not have to think about anything except punching a clock.”

The elitism rolls off this piece like the fog hovering above a lake on a brisk morning.  (UPDATE:  Although once the uproar started hurting the DFL, Rom and Carron were sorry they got caught).

Trouble is, these people are traditional DFLers (although that’s been eroding in recent years).   So Martin’s gotta defend ’em – right?

Not so fast.  Martin’s leash is largely held by Metrocrat environmentalists – the Roms and the Carrons – with deep pockets.  The people behind Minnesota’s biggest environmental groups are the same as those behind Minnesota’s biggest “progressive” money pools, like “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”; indeed the law firms that spawned the likes of Rom and Carron are, themselves, among the DFL’s biggest donors.

So let’s spare a thought for Ken Martin; he has to defend the virtue of workers – the vestiges of the “Labor” in Democrat Farmer Labor party – in an industry that his party’s big money hates, from the depredations of the national Democrat party’s Praetorian Guard.

How did he do?

Millennials trend left on everything but guns – where they turn into Real Americans.

Polling in gun politics is notoriously murky—much lies in the crafting of the question—but demographers have consistently reported a conservative streak in millennial attitudes on guns. Respondents aged 18-29 are the least likely in the country to support a renewed ban on assault weapons, at 49 percent, a fact that has helped drive nationwide support down to a record low. Pew’s data suggest that those falling in the youngest age range have dropped the furthest in support for “gun control” since 2000 (when the alternative is presented as “gun rights”). And when the question concerns the National Rifle Association’s top legislative priority, concealed carry, millennials appear to lead the country. According to Gallup’s version of the question in 2004, the notion that concealed guns made for safer spaces polled at 25 percent; 11 years later, it registered at 55 percent nationally. The greatest support came from those ages 18-29, at 66 percent, a full 10 points greater than the next highest scoring demographic.

There’s hope.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Players continue to kneel for the national anthem so the NFL decided not to broadcast that part of the game.  Out of sight, out of mind, right?

No.  Fans aren’t stupid.  We can tell you’re trying to hide the ball and we know you’re doing it because you’re siding with the protesters against the fans, which annoys us even more.  Ratings are down another 5% from last week.

I suspect we’re going to get a new self-destructive behavior metaphor: kill the golden goose, cut off your nose to spite your face, hoist on your own petard, New Coke, shoot yourself in the foot, and soon: “pulling an NFL” meaning “driving away your own customers to prove how virtuous you are.”

Joe Doakes

They’re smarter than us, you know.

Whew.  Busy show today.  Let’s get started:

• Here’s how to learn more about Fadumo Yusuf’s campaign in Minneapolis’ Sixth Ward
• Here’s the link to Twila Brase’s “Citizens Council for Health Freedom“, including their annual dinner featuring Pete Hegseth and Howard Root.
• Here’s Abby Sookraj’s blog, “Bad Laws Hurt People“; find out more about how Robbinsdale plans to solve all its problems by regulating cigarettes even more.