I read the news the other day about the escalating violence along the Indo-Pakistani border, and out of curiosity, went over to Facebook to check in on some friends. Specifically, a former co-worker whose husband was a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force.
Bit of a good news/bad news situation. Nobody’s been shot down…
I met WIng Commander Gandhi a few times, when he was visiting his wife – I was struck by the irony that in the US, it’s usually the military spouse that spends their time overseas; among Indians, it’s the spouse who works in technology that does the globetrotting while the military spouse stays in India and watches the borders). I was struck – as were many others – by his passion for flying jet fighters, shared with everyone I’ve ever known who took up that vocation (including longtime friend and occasional commenter “Fingers”, who’s so passionate about it he did it in both the Navy and the Air Force).
I’m not so young that I don’t expect people I know, even obliquely, to die unexpectedly. I’m not so old that it doesn’t shock me a little, still.
To: My Various Pro-“Choice” Friends From: Mitch Berg, Disgusted Peasant Re: WTF
So when we had our discussions over the years about abortion, I responded to your palaver about “women owning their bodies” with an incisive “Yeah, but let’s give some moral weight to the fact that the fetus is intended to become a human.
To which you responded “Look, nobody wants an abortion” – which seemed fair enough – and the ever-threadbare “We want abortion to be safe, legal and rare“.
To which I nodded my head, not really believing you believed it.
Alive. Human, even according to the infanticide industry’s orthodoxy of, it seems, mere weeks ago.
One after another, Democratic senators took to the floor to smear the bill as an attack on women’s health care, a baseless criticism that they failed to substantiate. In the process, they revealed their belief that allowing unwanted infants to perish after birth constitutes a form of women’s health care. Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) reintroduced his Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in direct response to Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s endorsement of permitting mothers and doctors to let infants die of neglect. “The infant would be delivered,” Northam said, explaining a hypothetical case in which a woman in labor wanted an abortion. “The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” This “discussion” is what Democrats voted on Monday to preserve — a discussion not about health-care options for women but about whether or not to extend health care of any kind to newborn infants. With their votes and their speeches, 44 U.S. senators embraced Ralph Northam’s position, which, despite attempting to clarify, he has never retracted. “I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re okay with infanticide,” Sasse said at the start of floor debate on Monday. “This language is blunt. I recognize that. It is too blunt for many people in this body. But frankly, that is what we’re talking about here today. Infanticide is what [the bill] is actually about.”
I gotta say it – after the bloodbath of the midterms, I predicted the Democrats, in MInnesota and DC, would overreach.
As bad as the party of Tide Pod Eviita has been on soooo many issues, this one may be the nauseating acme.
Earlier this week, hundreds of students “spontaneously” walked out of Minneapolis’ Patrick Henry High School to demand legislators take away Second Amendment rights currently deemed unfashionable by Big Left.
The Media was waiting, cameras all a-whirl.
OK, I lied. It was ten kids.
OK. I only half lied. The Strib was waiting anyway , there to give the “spontaneous” anti-freedom demonstration all the attention it wanted.
So when President Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”, let’s just say my condemnation is muted to the point of nonexistence.
Sarah A. Hoyt is a writer. I enjoy her column, this line in particular: “Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.” It’s not only a clever riff on Arthur C. Clarke, it also explains so much about Democrats today. It’s too hard to tell if they’re stupid or evil and doesn’t matter anyway. Both evil AND stupidity must be resisted.
Kelly Moller – who defeated the competent and useful Randy Jessup in the Metro Massacre last fall – is on a committee that’s in charge of writing and debating laws setting statewide policy.
And she just doesn’t liiiiiiike having to deal with all those pesky peasants:
Know thy place, knave.
Trashing transparency. Jamming down taxes. Telling all you peasants to shut up and get in line.
In 2017, a Planned Parenthood client came forward to share her story of wanting an abortion at 22-weeks and seeking that procedure from Planned Parenthood. The abortionists at the clinic walked her through the procedure and stated if they were “to proceed with the abortion and the baby was to come out still alive and active, most likely we would break the baby’s neck.” This practice carried out by Planned Parenthood abortionists in Minnesota directly violates the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, that states if the baby “breathes or has a beating heart” regardless of “whether the umbilical cord has been cut” or if birth occurred by “induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.” The Planned Parenthood client who came forward engaged in a two-day abortion procedure. On the second day, she had a change of heart and decided she wanted to keep her baby and continue her pregnancy. She expressed how insistent the abortionists were on continuing the abortion and felt “as if they were trying to sell me this abortion.” She finally convinced them to let her keep her baby and now has a happy and healthy child.
I try to keep calm and collected about this kind of thing, but my disgust is starting to grow claws.
The party of James Hodgkinson, of “Anti”-Fa, of Eric “Nuke The Gun Owners” Swalwell, of “Fight in the Streets” (VP candidate Tim Kaine and Loretta Lynch ) and demands for military coups (Sarah Silverman) and punching teenage girls (Woody Kaine) and grownup girls (Keith “Thumper” Ellison) and fantasies (Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Bow Wow) and dramatizations (Kathy Griffin) and internal media threads about killing Republicans, of multiple dramatic and “comedic” productions featuring the violent deaths of Republicans (including Dubya and The Donald), of co-opting the same of a movement that killed “the enemy” with guns and bombs and molotov cocktails (“The #Resistance“) and generalized inchoate rage (Amy “Dearest” Klobuchar) and countless threats against everyone from the Covington Kids to yours truly and my friends, and a generalized climate of violent bigotry and hatred, not to mention a two year long tantrum over losing an election to which they felt entitled…
…is upset that Representative Cal Bahr, in a bit of rhetorical flourish, urged a group of people who are, statistically speaking, 42 times less likely to commit ANY violent crime than the general public to “run over” and “stomp on”…
Not-especially-seemly confession; I’ve never been to a strip club.
But there are a few photos circulating from thirty years ago that, I suspect, a few lefty social media gerbils would flog their nether bits into frenzies of microturgidity if they could find ’em; I’m talking with a couple of strippers in a bar.
We’re all working in the bar (including them – clothed. It was a promotion for the sleazy DJ service I worked for). And they were friends of mine; we shared a stretch of our lives working in bars entertaining drunks in widely varying ways.
I thought about that when I saw an article recently about a Buzzfeed piece in which the “writer” “slut-shamed” Tucker Carlson for sharing a friendly (literally, nothing more) moment with a “Sex Worker” at the funeral of a mutual friend. It was a display of the sort of moral cretinousness that today’s left is perfecting.
And the responses have been interesting; Big Leftymedia tittered like a bunch of fourth-graders (or perhaps fourth-graders titter like “liberal” “journalists”); in the meantime, the conservative commentary site “The Federalist” gave the woman a forum:
That it was made an issue speaks to the fact that a progressive journalist believed that a man to whom she has ascribed a belief system would be shamed by being in this photo. She attempted to call out his hypocrisy, as journalists so often do. But the hypocrisy didn’t exist. Moreover, if Aurthur, as a good leftist, has no problem with sex work then why would she have an issue with someone else not being troubled by it either? Christina Parreira, the sex worker featured in the photo, found a place to speak her truth in The Federalist, a conservative outlet long derided by the progressive left for mostly vacuous reasons. The fact that a sex worker had to set the record straight in The Federalist about a Twitter-based kink shaming hoax speaks to the change that has been happening throughout our media. Outlets that were once considered to be beacons of free expression are now more prudish and censorious than the outlets they critique.
Their only real morality is “tear down the ‘opposition'”.
Background: At the Gun Rights rally last Saturday, Rep. Cal Bahr told the crowd we needed to “Stomp” gun control bills, and the idea that oppressing the law-abiding is a good plan to dela with crime.
Was Bahr’s rhetoric (for which he has since apologized and clarified) mprudent? Perhaps.
About 1,000 of my closest friends turned out for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus’ “2019 Rally To Protect The 2nd Amendment” on Saturday.
Photo by Sarah Cade, Cade Imaging
Bear in mind – the weather on Saturday was inclement at best. I think the good guys expected half this number for turnout.
Compare this to “Protect” Minnesota’s turnout on a beautiful day a few weeks back:
Photo – Rob Doar
The comparison is inescapable – Second Amendment Civil Rights activists are real people, motivated by their real passion for securing civil liberty for all Americans; gun control activists are uninformed dupes of plutocrats who seek to enslave Real Americans.
Go ahead, Ryan Winkler. Bring those bills to the floor. I dare you.
How do climate proponents of anthropomorphic global warming reconcile these articles: this article , and this one . 20 years ago, climate scientists confidently assured me that as the planet warmed, snowfall would cease. I assume their assurance was based on some scientific model linking CO2 to increasing temperatures to melting polar ice, etc. But we just had a record snowfall even as CO1 readings and global temperatures continue to rise. Does that mean there’s a flaw in the model? This is a serious question, because at the moment, it looks as if the model has failed as a predictor and that brings into question the value of the AGW theory in general. Joe Doakes
Phony “survivors” making up stories about Brett Kavanaugh: heroes.
Survivor of one of the most harrowing rapes – no, read the account, there’s no euphemizing it – who calls BS on Big Media’s growing uselessness to preserving democracy?
to make it harder for citizens to participate (the capacity of the auditorium is far less than that of the various hearing rooms at the state capitol)
to kill transparency; the existing hearing rooms allow the hearings to be broadcast, so the people statewide can see the DFL in all its skullduggerous pettifogging glory
If you’re a gun owner who uses public transit? Unless you live within a mile or so of the school, it’s 2-3 transfers to get there.
Worst of all, it creates a “felony trap” for law-abiding citizens wanting to attend the hearings
Oh, yeah – and it seems more than likely that the Edina school board is playing games, effectively barring just sent in groups from using public space in which to stage dissenting demonstrations.
This was always going to be one of those sessions where we need law-abiding gun owners to step up and show the weasels in the DFL who’s boss.
This time, more than most: the good guys are going to have to:
Protest against the use of the public hearing process for propaganda purposes
Protest against the useless and oppressive bills themselves.
In the meantime, the good guys need to melt down Rep. Mariani’s phone line (651-296-9714) and blow up his inbox (rep.carlos.mariani@house.gov) with respectful, thoughtful, considered messages indicating that the People of Minnesota would really like hearings to be about policy, not DFL propaganda.
Either way – whether the hearings are at the Capitol or at Valley View, if you could be rarin’ to go on Wednesday, let’s all make an evening of it, OK?
UPDATE: Since Valley View Middle School is in fact a school, carry is illegal under Minnesota law…
…unless you get permission from the Superintendent per Minnesota statute.
So send the Superintendent, and Valley View’s principal, a request to honor your permit. The template is right here. It should download an MS Word file. Change the return address and signature line to your own, and send it to the two officials (email address provided in the template).
Then share your responses in the comment section.
DIVERSITY ALERT: The school would seem to have been chosen to mirror the utter Caucasianity of Minnesota’s gun grabber cult:
UPDATE + BIG WIN! – The “hearing” has been postponed and will apparently be moved.
Where? Well, hopefully the Capitol. But we’ll see.
Anyway – the good guys won this skirmish; apparently Rep. Mariani’s inbox was already gushing smoke when he walked in this morning (yes, I made that up, but you gotta admit it’s a wonderful image, right?), and the Edina Schools got so many permission requests they’ve worn out the Control+V keys on several office keyboards.
I am a Saint Paul resident. I am writing to protest the hijacking of the hearing process to serve as a DFL propaganda event.
Putting the hearings on the Red Flag Gun Confiscation and Universal Registration bills at Valley View Middle School next week is exploitive, emotionally manipulative, and worst of all creates a potential felony trap for law-abiding citizens wishing to attend the hearings.
It’s also un-transparent – there is far less space for spectators, and the hearings can’t be broadcast on the House video stream.
This move is manipulative and deeply undemocratic, and I really hope you will reconsider.
Reading about MNLARS – the state’s drivers license, registration and titling system – is making me nostalgic.
Back in 1996-97, I worked for a company that was engaged to do the engineering for a big, extremely well-funded startup in Palo Alto, run by a former salesman from IBM. The company’s business model: pay people to read spam. The theory was, people would set up accounts, and then get a little bit of the ad buy money for clicking on ads, and links in spam emails.
Catering to greed, of course, is never a bad business model. But by the time I left the company, we were figuring that someone clicking on six ads a minute, 8 hours a day, might make $6-8.
I wound up leaving – and was delighted to read in PC Magazine that the project had made their “Ten Dumbest Ideas of 2007” poll. By this time, I the company had folded, taking $30 million in investor funding with it (along with, I was less delighted to learn, the company that I’d worked for).
Remember when $30 million on a bad idea seemed like a lot of money?
If that’d been a government project…
Oh, wait.
The Minnesota taxpayer has spent close to $100 million on the MNLARS system – half up front, leading to a spectacular failure, and half for a “fix” that failed even worse.
Walz released a budget this week that includes $94 million through 2021 to finish the system known as MNLARS, operate it for two years, hire staff, and reimburse deputy registrars who took a financial hit from the botched 2017 rollout. That’s on top of $15.7 million in stopgap funding that Walz was already seeking to get the system through June 30.
To pay for some of the costs, Walz has proposed a $2 fee every time a driver makes a vehicle license, tab or title transaction.
Rep. Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez may be this year’s socialist flavor of the month, a would-be disruptor of American politics.
But in another very important way, she seems to be very much business-as-usual; there’s evidence that, like (it seems) most Democrats from New York City, she’s corrupt as the day is long.
Almost too hard to pick a single pullquote from this long, laboriously researched piece. You should read it all.
But here’s an important bit:
Regardless of whether or not [Ocasio Cortez’ boyfriend Riley] Roberts was officially AOC’s spouse [at the time her campaign staff showed him on salary], it seems probable [Ocasio Cortez’ benefactor, strategist and now chief of staff Saikat] Chakrabarti was reimbursing her for her campaign expenses off-books. Brand New Congress PAC simply served as a pass-through to do so. When AOC won, she then hired Chakrabarti, her strategist/patron, as her Chief of Staff. Taking money from a rich guy, trying to hide it by passing it through a PAC, and then giving her benefactor a government job. That’s definitely unethical and potentially illegal. Chakrabarti may have made an illegal campaign contribution in excess of federal limits. Regardless, it raises questions about Chakrabarti’s hiring as AOC’s Chief of Staff after her election. Maybe add that to your next lightning round, Congresswoman.
So if wrote a piece about a fact-checking site “checking facts” on a satirical story, you’d either think that the “Fact Check” site was the one being satirical, or that the satire site had gone just a tad over the top.
Neither is apparently the case in this story, in which Snopes “fact checks” Babylon Bee – which, in its own way may be America’s finest news source today, if you think about it – and a “story” it did about Jussie Smollett getting a job at CNN. Babylon Bee was (so far) being satirical, and Snopes was not.
Oh, yeah – did I say the Bee was likely America’s most reliable source of news? I’m being a little less satirical than they are:
Nick Sandmann and the other Covington Kids, justifiably upset after malicious editing left them the targets of the purple-faced rage of America’s virtue-signaling lynch mob, are suing the WaPo for $250 million.
The lawsuit claims The Post “ignored the truth” about the incident and says the paper “falsely accused Nicholas of … ‘accost[ing]’ Phillips by ‘suddenly swarm[ing]’ him in a ‘threaten[ing]’ and ‘physically intimidat[ing]’ manner … ‘block[ing]’ Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips ‘to retreat,’ ‘taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,’ [and] chanting, ‘Build that wall,’ ‘Trump2020,’ or ‘Go back to Africa,’ and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct. …”Sandmann’s attorneys accuse The Post of publishing seven “false and defamatory” articles about the incident between Jan. 19 and 21 and claim the paper “knew and intended that its false and defamatory accusations would be republished by others, including media outlets and others on social media.”
Defamation cases are hard to win – justifiably so. We don’t want a system like the UK, where the famous and well-connected can shut up all criticism.
On the other hand, given the intensity of Big Media’s drive to “other” everyone who didn’t vote for Hillary, I’m wondering if there’s a legal theory that’d support a class action defamation suit?
If we could get over a thousand people there, it’d send a very powerful message to the DFL in the House.
I’ll be there. I’ll be broadcasting a NARN episode from the last rally, in April – a fairly evergreen one about the imperative for citizens to support the right to keep and bear arms along with all the others.
Be a loser living in their mom’s basement, or a preacher of some obscure separatist sect back in some holler in the Appalachians, or to pick a current example, the “editor” of a newspaper with a circulation roughly that of this blog’s daily readership. Then…
The media is, of course, trying to “de-normalize” opposition to the Big Left – to create the impression that the people #TheResistance is resisting really are the deplorables really are the cartoons Obama and Hillary described.
Our media have to crawl way up into “the woodwork” to create the impression that racists are “coming out of the woodwork”.
But let’s be fair – it is more honest than the Southern Poverty Law Center’s approach, which is to just lie about it.
I don’t know about you – but these days, when a accusation of a “hate crime” gets massive, immediate coverage, I’ve started to assume it’s a hoax until proven otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong – hate crimes exist. But the more publicity the unproven allegations get, and the more lurid the charges against someone in a MAGA cap, the more likely it seems the whole story turns out to have all the substance and integrity or a Ryan Winkler presentation on Black History Month.
Jussie Who?:Three weeks ago, I had not heard of Jussie Smollett. I’ve never had occasion to watch Empire, and I doubt I ever will.
But when I heard the story of the “Hate Crime” that reached out and, per his story, caught him a few weeks ago, nothing, even to my rather cursory listening, seemed to add up.
8 . How likely do you think it is that attackers would shout, “This is MAGA country” in Chicago, a place that no one thinks is MAGA country?
There are 26 more – the sort of thing “journalists”, ostensibly being the curious sort, should have asked.
13. Don’t you think it strange that his attackers fled without much harming Smollett or robbing him?
14. Related to (13), did it not occur to you that the whole alleged attack looked a bit like the criminal equivalent of a press release, meant to send a message rather than accomplish anything?
15. If you were beaten up, would you somehow remember to pick up your Subway purchase afterward?
Goalposts Moved: Over the weekend, as Smollett’s story began to collapse, the narrative changed; Smollett’s actions weren’t themselves a publicity “hate crime” against deplorables; they were “starting a conversation”:
Don’t let anyone say this latest hate crime hoax was okay because it “started a conversation.”
This episode SHOULD start a conversation – about the outright bigotry of the media and those who hate Trump and his supporters so much they will do things like this.
I don’t know about you, but I think Jussie Smollett, and especially all the #Resitance media sycophants who parroted the story because, if you hate the MAGAs, it’s just too good to fact-check, just made life a lot harder for people who actually do wind up on the wrong side of bigotry.
I’ve neither talked with nor heard from “Wyatt” for over 30 years. I will confess, I googled him about ten years ago, and found from a few news stories – a break-in at a liquor store, a trial and sentence – that showed that his habits were keeping him in just as much trouble as they did when I knew him.
I also knew he had a father – a fairly wealthy man, a former Navy frogman who had done well in, I believe, real estate or insurance or something like that – and a mother. And I knew his family loved him, and spent a lot of money and, I suspect, a lot more effort and emotional energy, trying to get him on the right track – including sending him to treatment in Minnesota, which of course led him across my path in 1987.
And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.
A bit of curious googling over the weekend brought it all back.
“Wyatt” had a real name. And he died in 2010 – ironically, not long after his departure from the series. Tragically, but not in the least bit surprisingly, he died of mixing drugs and booze.
And I’m going to admit – while my “Wyatt” tales in “Twenty Years Ago Today” were true down to the last comma and semicolon, they painted as one-dimensional a picture of him as one might expect someone who, twenty years later, was still kicking himself for letting that kind of dysfunction into his life, and the consequences it brought.
The article – featuring his parents, who have stayed involved in trying to help the mentally ill over the years – brings a human aspect to “Wyatt” – Wyeth – that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge when I wrote the series, over a decade ago.
