MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch says Democrats should spare no effort to “put Trump in jail”.

Zzzzzzzzzz. That’s not “dog bites man”. That’s not even “dog licks dog”.

The iinteresting thing here is Deutsch’s…er, permissive and selective self-image. Emphasis added:

Deutsch … implored Democrats to use “fear” to campaign against Trump to paint a picture of a “dystopian society” that will follow a Trump second term.

“The one tool we have to use that the Democrats never use is fear,” Deutsch said on ‘Morning Joe’ Friday. “Start to stop talking about Donald Trump today and yesterday and start to paint a picture of what the next four years would look like. Maybe even the next 8, 12 years because he doesn’t think he’s going anywhere of the possible path to a dystopian society. There is no more playing. We cannot bring a knife fight to a bazooka gunfight.”

Democrats “never use fear”.

Other than

• climate change (or at least the parts they claim will require bigger, richer government to “fix”
• Gun violence (it’s dropping, not rising)
• White guys (we’re in year 11 of Democrats assuring us that there’s a wave of “white nationalist violence” around the corner. Any day now. Honest.
• Racism
• Sexism
• Homophobic violence
• Women being turned into robots, a la Handmaid’s Tale

I’d hate to see what it’s like when they do start appealing to fear…

It’s a good observation.

It’s funny, in the same way that ‘Gun Safety” has nothing to do with safety, and “Gun Control” leaves even fewer controls on the guns that rational people do actually want controlled.

I’m a Christian.

Beyond that, I’m pretty committed to the Presbyterian church. Part of it is that the church traditionally favors ministers who give really good sermons; my dad was a speech teacher, and “giving speaker points” is kind of the family business. More importantly, I believe the Presbyterian book of worship puts less temporal fuzz between man and Christ than any other denomination.

And American democracy was influenced for the better by the Presbyterian church’s manner of temporal government.

But the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), the largest Presbyterian denomination in the US, has been pulling *hard* to the left since I was in my twenties. They’ve dived deep into the “social justice” swamp; some congregations go out of their way to make it *extremely* uncomfortable to dissent with church leadership, not on matters of faith, but on matters of temporal government policy and social belief.

And it shows. The PCUSA is on track to disappear, demographically, by 2040 – worse than the Episcopals. Its membership is collapsing faster than the Cleveland Indians every June. It’s easier to find a closed PCUSA church than an operating one in most of the Twin Cities these days. And church leadership – the “General Assembly” – publicly calls this a feature, not a bug; they rejoice at all those dissenters leaving the PCUSA and going elsewhere. They are, in short, participating enthusiastically in tribalizing America – in pushing “The Big Sort” that is polarizing every facet of American life.

The hiring of a full-time gun control activist wrapped in an ecclesiastical costume is just a further nail in the PCUSA’s demographic coffin. I left the PCUSA 12 years ago; it’s a pity, because I’d leave them again if I could.

And I hate that – the fact that the PCUSA is driving people away from their spiritual home over matters that, in the eternal scheme of things, aren’t what the church is supposed to be into. Several of the most important, formative figures of my life are or were PCUSA pastors. Much of what I am today, at least the good stuff, is because of the influence that my church’s pastor and youth group leaders, and some of my Presbyterian-affiliated college faculty, had on me.

I don’t think that matters to the PCUSA anymore.

And when I say “ecclesiastical costume”, I’m being pretty charitable and neutral:

I expect resistance because when you talk about guns, you are tapping into the part of the brain that protects one’s identity. Guns and identity are linked for many people; that is why I have developed a spiritual practice that helps us shift our bodies from fight-or-flight mode and teaches us to welcome and hold with compassion all the sensations that arise in our bodies. When we connect with one another on the level of personal experience, it leads to empathy. Establishing empathy is key in peacemaking.

I’d be tempted to ask if she thinks that’d work with Nik Cruz, Dylan Roof, Omar Matteen and the like – but then, I’m pretty sure “dodging reality” is the reverend’s stock in trade.

If you’re a Presbyterian? There *are* options. I’ve moved to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The “Presbyterian Church in America” is also out there. I recommend you take a look at it, if you can.

By the way: “thoughts and prayers” – also known as reflection and rational thought – are *exactly* what is needed after a tragedy or atrocity – and nothing about thinking and praying rules out needed action. But thinking (and if you’re a believer, prayer/meditation/mindfulness) are nothing but a benefit when it comes to taking the *right* action.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to logroll you…

…oh, yeah. Never mind.

Jezebel is to feminism what Facebook is to human communication.

That said:

The proposed Berg’s 21st Law – “With progressivism, yesterday’s joke is today’s demand and tomorrow’s policy”.

The Star Tribune, motivated (I’d suspect) by the very real spectre of being made to look like an in-the-bag PR flak for the DFL (perish the thought) by mushrooming coverage from out-of-town and national media, finally reports on Ilhan Omar’s alleged marital “irregularities”

New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.
Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.

“But Mitch – you ascribe this to sensitivity about the Strib’s part about its reputation?”

I do – because the Strib does:

The new documents also detail the Omar campaign’s efforts to keep the story of her marriage to Elmi out of the press, arguing that detailed coverage would legitimize the accusations and invade her privacy.

“Efforts” that have been, until now, utterly effortless.

Gilroy Garlic Festival. A gun free zone in a gun free state:

Three people were killed and 15 injured. In 2018, the County with a little over 1.5 million adults had issued just 113 concealed handgun permits — that is just 0.007% of adults. To put it differently, that is only 1 permit issued for every 14,300 people. General citizens in Santa Clara County are banned from being able to carry concealed handguns. There is no nearby county that has even one percent of the population with permits, and for California as a whole, only 0.39% of adults have a permit. Last year, outside the restrictive states of California and New York, about 8.63% of the adult population has a permit.

And the security whose job it was to try to protect people “better than they could do it themselves?”

The shooter went to the unbelievable length of…avoiding it:

Police said the man who opened fire at the festival Sunday, killing three and wounding 15, was able to get around security by entering through a back area of Christmas Hill Park.
Gilroy Police Chief Scott Smithee said the gunman used “some sort of tool” to cut a fence next to a creek to get into the event.
Christmas Hill Park backs up against a wilderness area, though it is unclear exactly where the gunman entered.
Smithee said the festival had security checkpoints with metal detectors.

I started trying to count up all the mass shootings that’d taken place in guns where, unbelievably, shooters had broken laws and even explicitly evaded security measures. I gave up. It’s not “all of them”, but it’s pretty close.

Government in California would rather you were helpless and dead than have the ability to resist.

So would anyone who proposes gun control.

As crime plummets in the rest of Minnesota, violence creeps ahead in the Metro – most of it using mundane, stolen conventional handguns.

And suicides claim 80% of the gun deaths in Minnesota – mostly unfashionable older guys with depression and frequently terminal illnesses. And with suicide, magazine size is utterly irrelevant.

But Keith Ellison – former Congressman and current Attorney General with, one suspects, aspirations to the office of Governor of Minnesota, has filed an amicus brief in a state case seeking to limit magazine sizes.

Of course. limiting magazine sizes has no effect on violent crime – not even mass shootings. Especially not street crime or suicide.

But that’s how he’s wasting his time and your dollars.

You need to help fix that.

Go here and email his office; there’s an email form (please rewrite the boilerplate message to suit). You can also call – leave a polite but firm message.

We need to blow his inbox and switchboard to shreds with belt-fed reason and indignation.

…is to be anywhere off the mainstream. To say nothing of getting arrested.

of getting arrested.

“Danielle Stella”, of whom nearly nobody in the Fifth CD GOP has ever heard, and who has absolutely no chance of getting the nomination to run against, much less beat, Ilhan Omar, is making all sorts of international headlines:

A pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress who is aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar in Minnesota has been charged with a felony after allegedly stealing from stores.
Danielle Stella was arrested twice this year in Minneapolis suburbs over allegations that she shoplifted items worth more than $2,300 from a Target and goods valued at $40 from a grocery store. She said she denied the allegations

And with that, Danielle Stella’s miscreancy just got more publicity than all of Ilhan Omar’s allegations have gotten in the Strib’s.

When it comes to try to peddle a little bit of melanin, a contrived twig on a family tree, or an ancestry with little history in the US, none of it involving systematic repression, into a rhetorical get out of jail free by calling the jailer “racist” card, Elizabeth Warren is the grand dame.

But she’s got competition. Rashida Tlaib – as antisemitic as Ilhan Omar, without the domestic legal baggage, so far – seems to qualify:

…[I]t strikes me as odd that no one has yet pointed out the most glaring fact about the Squad of Four “women of color” running amok in the Congress: one of them is obviously a white woman.  This rather makes calling their critics racist even more absurd.  Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit of Palestinian Arab ancestry.  Arabs from the Near East are white, and always have been, as far as the U.S. Census Bureau and American society at large are concerned.
In the supercharged race-hustle of today’s left-wing politics, though, everyone wants super-victim racial status.  Not many American politicos are actually full descendants of black American slaves, so we have a lot of them scrambling to fit under the title “brown” or “of color.”  So far, none of the many white ethnic groups of the Near East — Greek, Jew, Arab, Turk, Kurd, Armenian, etc. — has been able to achieve this transformation and make it stick.  But left-wing Arabs and Persians are fighting to make it so, and Tlaib takes every opportunity to tell Speaker Pelosi that she and her gal pals are all women of color.  (Never mind that ethnic groups from the Near East are relative newcomers to America and have no history of mistreatment in this country.)

Watch for her to announce she’s a lesbian by the end of summer.

I interviewed Lacy Johnson during his run for the State House two years ago. He was a very impressive guy – North side businessman, incredibly sharp.

And he’s thrown his hat in the ring against Ilhan…well, Omar, officially. Who knows anymore?

Anyway – any race in Minneapolis is a long shot for Republicans, but give Lacey a listen.

I’ll be getting him on the show sooner than later.

I’ve been saying that the Democrat nomination – and most Democrat elections – will go to whichever candidate dishes the hopey-changey with the most enthusiasm, from the most intesectionally-correct platform.

And events seem to be bearing me out on that.

But it brings to mind something I’ve been joking about for a while. When it comes to progressive politics, yesterday’s jokes are today’s slogans and tomorrow’s campaign promises.

It’s on the brink of becoming Berg’s 21st Law.

Who knew – Berg’s Seventh Law covers intra-left squabbles as well.

Cultural appropriation is bad – unless, apparently, you’re appropriating it from other junctions in the intersectional map.

And Kira Davis has having nothing to do wtih it:

Since the “Broad Squad” came on the scene we have been incessantly barraged with rage rants about “people of color” and “women of color” and “brown people.” I myself have come to use these terms more than I care to, only because they are now a part of the vernacular.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t resent it.
Being a “woman of color” is not the same thing as being a Black woman, and yet the progressive Left has decided it is. A woman of Indian or Mexican heritage may possibly find herself coming up against some kind of discrimination here and there but it is not, nor will it ever be the same thing as what Black women have faced in this nation historically and to this day.
Not even close.

The likes of Tide Pod Evita and Ilhan Omar – people whose communities came here of their own free will – are trying to appropriate the unique (in this country, anyway) experience of black America for its own cheap gain.

The whole thing is worth a read.

They called MItt Romney a “racist” and “literally Hitler”.

Before that, they called John McCain a “racist” and “literally Hitler”.

Dubya, of course, they called a “racist” and “literally Hitler”.

Bob Dole, on the other hand, was “racist” and “literally Hitler”.

Ditto his dad. Don’t lie about it, ‘progs’ – they called 41 a “racist” and “literally Hitler”, too.

Reagan? Ford, Nixon, Goldwater? All “racist” and “literally Hitler”.

Might wanna think of another bit of logrolling and gaslighting.

Watching Maureen Dowd fret over the catfight between Gramma Nan and Tide Pod Evita is…

…well, deliciously life-affirming:

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.
“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.
“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
In the age of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.

On, Nan and Evita – I hate it when you fight.

No. Wait. I love it when you fight. My bad.

This is why we need universal background checks. Because only federal law enforcement officials can be trusted to scrupulously follow the law at all times, keeping the rest of us safe from criminals who would buy illegal firearms over the internet.

Joe Doakes

Don’t question the king or his knights.

A little over 100 years ago, the President of the United States – who was the former president of Princeton, an Ivy League university, not some pettifogging Son of the Confederacy – re-segregated the Federal government, opened the statutory floodgates for Jim Crow, and showed Birth of a Nation in the White House.

Eighty years ago, the Klan controlled entire cities and states. The could claim tens of thousands of members, and easily muster hundreds of marchers…in Minnesota.

Racial swamp critters like Father Coughlin and Gordon Winrod commanded massive radio audiences; in the thirties and forties, they commanded audience shares of the audience easily comparable to today’s talkers.

And the Deutch-Americanische Bund, an American outcrop of the Nazi party, had a significant following in the US – peaking during an evening in 1939 when, NPR reminds us, the Bund held an event in Madison Square Garden that drew 20,000.

A little over fifty years ago, segregationist Democrat George Wallace carried five states, cementing Hubert Humphrey’s political humiliation. The Klan actively, sometimes violent, resisted Civil Rights efforts earlier in the decade – in some cases, with relative impunity.

30-40 years ago, “Christian Identity” murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg (no relation) on his way to the station. Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, and (in my home state) the Posse Comitatus operated in the openly (and, in 1983) violently.

20-25 years ago, there was a Nazi cell operating semi-openly (at least, if you believed their Usenet BBS account) in Saint Cloud, and there was a White Supremacist record label operating in Saint Paul. A “Klan” rally drew about a dozen wan-looking “Klansmen” and a couple hundred counterprotesters to the Minnesota state capitol . There was a map of the greater Denver area that advised hikers and campers not to go into the mountains north of Boulder because of all the “Christian Identity” members that made their homes up there (although that was arguably humor or hysterics in action).

Today? The “Klan” musters nine people to a rally in Dayton, a city that was once one of their hotbeds north of the Mason Dixon. “White Supremacists” from 8-10 states mustered maybe 100 people in Charlottesville a couple years ago. You can search the world far and wide for a White Supremacist (off the Internet, anyway) who isn’t a doughy mid-thirties convenience store clerk who lives in his parents’ basement and leads a band of race warriors…on Reddit.

By any objective, concrete measurement, “white supremacy” as an organized activity has nearly disappeared.

(“White Supremacy” as an academic chanting point designed to bully and gaslight the vulnerable is another matter – but that’s another article).

And yet the media pushes the notion that “White Supremacy” is waxing across the country.

Am I the only who to whom it seems like the Big Media – and the Big Left for whom it works – is pushing the story to convince more loonies to try the White Supremacist lifestyle?

“Hey, dysthemic losers! Look at these other people like you! Come on out in the sunshine and romp and play! And maybe assemble in a group in front of this camera, with hand-lettered, misspelled signs? And when you do, make sure the one with the MAGA hat is up front! You are not alone!“

It reminds me of the Red Scare movies of the 1950s – if you get people thinking there are commies behind every bush, pretty soon someone will start seeing commies behind the bushes.

Herd mentality. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Saint Paul resident, sick of being ignored after repeated complaints about a homeless encampment outside his house, gets…

…well, a little heated:

A St. Paul man declared “all-out war” against a policy adviser in the mayor’s office when the city failed to remove a homeless encampment near his home, authorities say.
Jeffrey Karl Weissbach, 62, called City Hall on July 10 about an encampment that had taken shape in front of a bridge near his home in the 300 block of Colborne Street, according to a Ramsey County criminal complaint charging him with making threats of violence, a felony.

It doesn’t end well for him (so far).

But I have to admit, as someone who’s lived in Saint Paul for a long time, that I get it. The City of Saint Paul, being a one-party company town (the company is “government”) where “Urban Progressive Privilege” gives the public class a sense of entitlement that puts the whole “serving the tax-paying public” thing pretty much at the bottom of list of public priorities.

There is a difference between a reporter and a journalist.
A reporter tells you what happened: who, what, when, and where.
The journalist tells you how he feels about it, and you should too, if you weren’t such a hateful, racist, sexist, misogynist hater who hates.
This is why people love reporters and hate journalists. This is why Trump is making points with people who agree with him that journalist and their fake news are actually enemies of the people who want accurate information to make informed decisions.
Joe doakes

Experience on this blog shows this not to be a bad definition.

That feeling when you have a hard time telling the difference between the satire sites and the “news“.

I would check to make sure I put the right link with the right story – but what difference, at this point, does it make?

(Yes, I know the “real” news was from four years ago, and rated an apology. Doesn’t change my point).

Over ninety pecent of barristas predict coffee will be brewed at Metro coffee shops tomorrow.

Ninety percent of city government employees predict that some of their co-workers will take more coffee breaks than work time.

And in related news, a Pew poll says 90+% of Democrats predict violence erupting from tour current political situation:

Nearly 8 of 10 Americans told the Pew Research Center that supporters for both sides could “act” on the politically charged rhetoric with violence. It was higher for Democrats, 91%, than Republicans, 61%.

Ever notice how when you show a “progressive” a picture of a gun, they think “someone going crazy with a gun out of the clear blue sky”? When you show them a picture of a wealthy person they think of someone who predates on their fellow human? When you show them a gun owner, their thoughts turn immediately to genitals?

Likewise, when you mention political violence to the party of Kathleen Soliah, of “Anti”-Fa, of the Weather Underground and the Unibomber, you get…

…well, we know where this is headed, right?

You can’t eliminate supply until you eliminate demand; otherwise, somebody is always willing to meet the demand – we learned that in Prohibition, and the War on Drugs. 
If restaurant managers create the demand for illegal aliens, we need to educate restaurant managers not to do that.  And by “educate,” I mean “learn to make license plates at Stillwater.” 
Of course, the restaurant managers can defend saying “I thought she was legal,” same as any bartender who cards a college kid.  Show me what steps you took to verify identity and eligibility to work here.  Didn’t bother to look too hard, afraid of what you might find?  Weren’t willing to pay the wages an American demanded so you hired an illegal do to the work Americans would do – for that price?  Sucks to be you, Mr. Restaurant Manager.  You broke the law.
Notice who’s being targeted for deportation: families who have received deportation orders.  These aren’t refugees, they aren’t asylum seekers, these are people who had a court hearing and LOST.  They were ordered to leave and are defying the court order.  I’d like to see anybody else get away with that.  Just refuse to pay your child support and see what happens.
Joe Doakes

Would that they’d develop the same consideration for IRS courts.

But that’s just crazy talk.

SCENE: It’s the “Morgue” at the Star-Tribune’s “Morgue” – a room full of file cabinets, deep underground, where no light has penetrated since the Kennedy administration.

The door opens, and the MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY, wherein mismanagement under two DFL administrations led to hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, including credible allegations of welfare money being transferred to terrorists – is tossed into the room, which is crowded with other news stories.

ILHAN OMAR’S APPARENTLY FRAUDULENT-MARRIAGE STORY: Hello.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: Hi. Where am I?

WELL-CONNECTED DEMOCRAT KIDS GET OFF WITH A WARNING FOR MASS AGGRAVATED ASSAULT AND HATE CRIMES AGAINST REPUBLICANS STORY: This is the Star-Tribune’s “morgue” file.

STEVE SIMON IS STONEWALLING THREE COURT ORDERS DEMANDING HE RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT VOTING IRREGULARITIES STORY: It’s where news stories that the DFL establishment doesn’t want covered go to…

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: …for a nice long break.

(The other stories chuckle)

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So when do we get out of here?

(The question is met with a few guffaws)

ILHAN OMAR’S ANTISEMITISM STORY: When the Strib reports about Minnesota having “paradoxically” liberal gun laws and the lowest crime rate in the nation for a state with a major metro area in it.

MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES STORY: So – a long time?

KEITH ELLISON’S HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM STORY: You have no idea.

(And SCENE)

The world is coming up on the 80th anniversary of World War 2.

And to commemorate this, I’m going to reprise – and update, and add to – the series of World War 2 70th anniversary posts that First Ringer and I started on this blog almost…

…holy crap, ten years ago.

I’ll re-run a lot of the originals – augmented with new episodes, and in some cases updates based on, let’s just say, an evolving view of some of the history.

Starting…well, September First.

Or maaaaaaaaybe August 31…

When I was a kid, cars didn’t have seat belts.  My Dad installed some and we thought they were a nuisance but I don’t have to listen to flight attendants, I know how to operate the buckle on a 1960-style seat belt. 
I remember when George Bush the Elder was running for President, Doonesbury made fun of his support for air bags, calling them over-regulation (Google the cartoon for May 9, 1980). 
I never used to think airbags and seat belts made much difference, I figured it was all a bunch of Ralph Nader hype. No longer.  I’m a believer.  My car is totaled but I walked away without a scratch (bruises, but no scratches).
Friday night about 9:45 pm, dark but clear skies and dry road, coming home from Wisconsin on Hwy 36, stopped for a red light at Century Avenue (the at-grade crossing just East of the snowman, the intersection with the Dairy Queen).  I was in the right lane, last in a line of cars, sitting behind a Chevy Trailblazer.  Wham!  I got hit from behind. Never saw it coming.  I don’t think I blacked out, but one moment I was looking at the truck ahead of me, the next moment there was no truck ahead of me and my car was slowly rolling toward the ditch, the windshield wiper was flapping, I could hear a car alarm behind me and smell smoke inside my car.  I got my car stopped in the right turn lane before it rolled into the ditch, shut off the wiper, turned on the flashers, and sat there for a few seconds to gather my wits.
A passer-by pulled his car over in front of me, ran back to my car, and helped me get out because we didn’t know if the smoke meant my car was on fire.  He helped me walk around the back of my car where I had to lay down on the edge of the road, my back hurt too much to stand.  The ambulance came, cops came, I went to Regions Hospital for X-rays, the car went to the tow company’s storage lot, my wife rescued me from the hospital.
I have a sore back, sore rib, bruises on my knees where they must have hit the dash, and a big rash on my left bicep where it must have scraped the airbag.  Oh yes, my airbags deployed (two of them, one in the steering wheel and one under the dash).  That’s the smoke I smelled – they use a powder charge to propel the bag.  No car fire.
The state trooper who gave me the PBT on the side of the road (I passed!) visited me at the hospital.  He said the kids in the car that struck me were 19 years old and did not pass the test (passenger was .08 and driver was .01).  They claimed the light was green, they were changing lanes, I was sitting in the road for no reason.  The trooper took one look at my car and laughed at them.  He said they never touched their brakes, no skid marks at all, they hit me at highway speed 55-60, and that’s why my trunk is all smashed in.  They hit me so hard, the garage door opener hanging on the visor came loose but by the time it started to fall, my car had already moved forward so far that the garage door opener ended up in the back seat.  The impact shoved my car into the back end of the Trailblazer hard enough to push my engine back a foot.
I asked the trooper if anybody else got hurt and he said no, the kids were fine and the guy in the Chevy ahead of me fled the scene.  Another passer-by followed him and got a license plate.  The trooper suspects that driver was drunk too, or uninsured, or had no license – some reason he didn’t want to talk to the cops.
There is no doubt in my mind the safety improvements built into my car saved me from serious injury.  I was searing my seat belt with shoulder harness which stopped me from hitting the windshield.  The driver’s headrest was properly adjusted to avoid whiplash.  The airbags kept me from hitting the steering wheel. The crumple zones designed into the car’s frame soaked up the impact on both front and back.
KIDS!  Wear your damned seat belts!
I’m stiff and sore but I’m going to be okay.  Going to get ready for church now.  Got a lot to be thankful for today.  Take good care, everybody.
Joe Doakes

I’m a believer.

54 years ago this coming Monday, my mom was driving me around Jamestown in my dad’s old Mercury. It was a two-door – and folding front seats didn’t have seat locks. The dashboard was all metal, except where it was even more metal. Seatbelts? Forget about ’em.

This was also long before car seats. And I was a squirmy toddler who was standing up on the passenger-side back seat…

…when Mom slammed on the brakes when someone ran a stop light.

I still fairly clearly remember sailing over the folding back seat and face-planting into the all-metal glove box. I’m less clear on remembering the stitches that followed – six, I think – but the scar is there over my right eye to remind me.

What Joe said. Wear your seat belts. And stay sober when you drive.

SQUAD: “America is a racist, place, built around institutionalizing white supremacy and victimizing women, people of color and the poor, and is controlled by Jewish money”.

NON-SQUAD: “So it sounds like you don’t care much for America?”

SQUAD: “RACIST!”