Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Santa Clause: “Thanks for coming, Larry.  I understand you’re not happy being an ordinary elf, making toys and wiggling your ears and saying “hee hee” and “ho ho” and stuff like that.  Is it true?”
Larry the Elf: “Oh, no, Santa. I love making toys and singing in the elf choir.”
Santa: “Larry, this is me.  Santa.  I know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.  Straight up, Larry, are you happy in your work?”
Larry: “Okay, yeah, it’s true.  I’m tired of manual labor and I hate singing.” 
Santa: “So what would you like to do, instead?”
Larry: “Well, Hermie got transferred to the dental clinic.”
Santa: “You want to be a dentist?”
Larry: “No, I want to be an accountant.”
Santa: “It’s worse than I thought.  Okay, tell you what.  I’m creating a new position for “Regulatory Compliance Officer.”  It’s a big responsibility but I’m sure you can handle it.  Want to give it a try?”
Larry: “Would I?  Oh, thank you, Santa, it’s Christmas come early for me.  I won’t let you down.” 


Three weeks later . . . 
Larry: “Thanks for seeing me, Santa.  I have a few things that need your decision.”
Santa: “Sure thing, Larry, fire away.”
Larry: “First off, I have letters from Norway, Greenland, Russia, and United States, all claiming jurisdiction over the North Pole and asserting we owe delinquent taxes.  How should I respond?”
Santa: “Tell them to pound snow.”
Larry: “Our no-fault insurer wants to know if you use your sleigh in business and how many miles per year.
Santa: “Refer them to Clement Moore, he documents all my travel arrangements.”
Larry: “The INS denied your application for a one-night visit.  Without a visa, we’ll have to cancel Christmas in America.  What are you going to do?”
Santa: “I aim to misbehave.” 
Larry: “Santa, I’ve got another hour’s worth of issues from liability waivers for walking on slippery roofs, to appeals from naughty children who didn’t get toys, to those animal-rights activists with the “Free Rudolph” signs. But I’m getting the impression that you don’t care about complying with regulations.  So what’s the point of my job?”
Santa: “You see, Larry . . . .”
***
Choose your own story.  What’s Santa’s reply?
Joe Doakes

As this is written, Saint Paul is getting around the plowing non-emergency streets. Sort of. Tonight and tomorrow will be the big nights for clearing Friday and Saturday’s fairly significant snowfall.

Guess who didn’t have to wait?

Mayor Carter.

And Public Works director and former City Council boss-lady Kathy Lantry:

But the city’s plows got everyone in the area – right?

Please. It’s Saint Paul – AKA “Animal Town”. And it appears some animals may just be a little more equal than others:

So that’s why property taxes are rising – to make sure our ruling class gets the level of service to which it’s accustomed.

Kamala “Boss Hogg” Harris has departed the Presidential race because racism…

…and not because she hasn’t gained any traction…

…with Democrats, who seem to have an all-white (plus Fauxcahontas) debate panel?

Democrats are so confusing.

In which Senate Democrats threaten to render the Supreme Court moot if they vote for the gun-rights case we talked about.

Liberals insist Citizens United was wrongly decided and must be overturned.  Really?  The Supreme Court made a mistake?  A mistaken decision must be overturned? 
Okay, I’m good with that.  But Citizens United concerns a narrow area of free speech as it applies to political campaigns. Let’s start with cases that have broader societal impact, because the errors those cases cause are much greater.  
Miranda v. Arizona
Roe v. Wade
Obergefell v. Hodges
Each of these stole the power of self-government from the states, where it rightfully belongs.  Let’s reverse all of them, then we can discuss why Hillary should be exempt from criticism. 
Joe Doakes

You notice, over time, how “logical consistency” isn’t much of a prioriity to Big Left.

This is the Associated Press, over the weekend:

In a sense, they have a point: I’ve been gleefully urging Democrats to push impeachment without rest almost since Trump was elected, seeing it as at best a goldmine for Trump, and at worst a gateway to a candidate I’d have actually supported on my own in 2016, Mike Pence, to the Oval Office.

But it’s almost like they want citizens to think that impeachment was part of some GOP/NRA/Heritage-Foundation/Military Industrial Complex plan to make the Democrats look like idiots.

And the worst thing is, Democrat voters will probably believe it.

The tale of the Brits who, despite their government’s best efforts to neuter them, dealt with the terrorist attack in London over the weekend:

Of course, the Brits are lucky it’s a story that’s gone ’round the world; if it were regular street crime, they’d be prosecuted more seriously than the thug.

It’s something to celebrate – and take as a warning. “Progressive” government – in this case, one that strips citizens of their means and right to self-defense, rendering a citizen a subject – is a bigger danger than terrorism.

Nobody needs more than one car. Nobody needs to drive a car more than once a month. There should be psychological profiles and strict background checks for all vehicle transfers, including loans to friends and rent a cars. A 6 gallon gas tank limit is plenty.

No wonder the Democrats and media are pushing the “impeachment effort” so hard; Warren is insane, and she’s the sanest of the bunch (among those who have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting nominated – sorry, A-Klo and whoever that flavor of the month from Hawaii was…).

Who am I talking about?

• A group with a political point of view gains control of the means not only of disseminating the nation’s history – its very story.
• The official story is made to comport with that dominant group’s narrative – in schools, journalism, academia, even museums.
• They even bring the apparatus of the state to bear to enforce that narrative, squashing freedom of speech.

Am I referring to America’s universities and public education system!

Well, yeah – but not just them. It’s not quite that simple.

Freedom to Talk Freedom: If you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the history of underdog nations and peoples – the land of most of my forefathers, Norway, as well as Israel, Finland, the Baltics (particularly Estonia), Denmark, Taiwan, and of course Poland.

Now, in Poland’s case, it’s not a story of absolutely unalloyed heroism; the Communist reign in Poland was administered and run by Poles – and there were wartime observations that some of the rural Poles living around the extermination camps were every bit as antisemitic as the Nazis themselves. And antisemitism didn’t end there; after the war, waves of antisemitic violence killed many of those who’d survived (including the leader of a heroic extermination camp breakout); in 1968, the Communist government of Władysław Gomulka expelled many of the remainder. While many Poles are represented among the “Righteous Among Nations”, they truly did face an uphill battle in large, rural swathes of the country.

Like all collections of humans, there are good ones and evil ones, and a whole lot in the middle that just wanted to survive, let along prosper, under atrocious circumstances.

That being said, Poles have for for freedom – theirs and others – since the 1700s. Poles were among the first Europeans to fight for what we now call liberal democracy, in their own homeland and ours (the American Revolution owed a debt to Kosciuszko and Pulaski). And the first tangible cracks in the Iron Curtain happened in Gdansk – in 1956 as well as 1980. There is much in the Polish heritage to balance the evil that popped up, here and there.

Poland is currently ruled by an electoral majority for the “Law and Justice” party – a party the media call “right wing”, although along with their rather fervid nationalism they have established one of the most expensive social welfare states in the European Union – which doesn’t protect them from the hatred of the Big Media, who links them, not completely inaptly, to Orange Literal Hitler Man.

And, as befits a nationalist party, they’re leading with the things that make their nation proud, and de-emphasizing the parts that don’t. Law and Justice is exerting political clout on controlling the narrative about Polish history that gets presented – via some means that should give First Amendment supporters critical pause. They’re not above a little Polish jingoism.

“On the Media” – which is to New York’s “elite” media what Pravda was to the Politburo – “tackled” the story over the weekend, with a series by reporter Laura Feder on the rise of Law and Justice, and the way they’ve exerted their control over the official history.

And it’s not all bad – it certainly helps that it’s not produced by the show’s usual hive enforcers, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone. There are certainly some questions worth asking of Law and Justice, if one is a Polish voter (as I definitely am not). And a few that could be asked of “On the Media” and Ms Feder; while she covers Gomulka’s forced expulsions, she softpedals the notion that that was as much Communist policy as Polish nativist bigotry.

I actually recommend giving the pieces, above, a listen, albeit a critical one; the progsplaining and the “liberals wear the white hats” schtick gets a little galling at times.

But here’s my real question: It’s a bad thing that Law and Justice is blocking free speech to spread their preferred narrative, squeezing out the honest, complete telling of the story.

So when will “On the Media” report on the very similar effort on the part of the American Big Left in media, academia and politics to similarly control, and dishonestly skew, their own narrative?

The mainstream media – specifically, the New York Times’ – coddling Joseph Stalin, including the genocide in Ukraine? The Times’ embrace of Hitler, and the burying of the origins of the Holocaust? Their extended french kiss of the Soviets during the Cold War? The modern left’s strong-arm take-over of the American narrative in academia?

It’s a rhetorical question, I know.

The Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly a decade, is hearing a significant Second Amendment case:

Faced with a defunct ban on transporting guns outside city limits, the increasingly conservative court majority could render a decision making clear what some justices believe: that the Second Amendment extends beyond the home, and that lower courts should view state and local limits on carrying guns in public with skepticism.
“This would be a strange case in which to go big,” says Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke University School of Law and co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “Yet the stakes going forward are potentially huge.”

I heard Prof. Blocher in NPR yesterday. He seems to believe that the SCOTUS will find some excuse to turn this case toward expanding limits on gun rights.

I’m not sure if it was Pauline Kael syndrome, or playing to the NPR audience’s echo chamber, or if he knows something I don’t. I wasn’t impressed.

Gun rights groups were surprised in January when the high court agreed to hear the case. Gun control groups were surprised in October when the justices refused to jettison it, even after the city and state erased restrictions that were likely unconstitutional.
Both actions went against the court’s recent modus operandi when it comes to guns: avoidance. Since its 2008 and 2010 rulings striking down gun restrictions in the District of Columbia and Chicago, the court has refused to hear dozens of cases challenging lesser limits on who can own what types of guns, where they can be taken, what requirements must be met and more.

Expect a ruling in June.

Jessica Kwong, progressive stenographer at former magazine “Newsweek”, on Donald Trump’s thanksgiving:

“it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake”

In other words, pre-written.

The Big Media aren’t “the enemy of the people”. They’re worse; after assuming the mantle of “guardian of democracy” (which, we are told, without their ministrations would “die in darkness”), they are doing something very, very different. They’re worse than an enemy; they are betraying a trust – however misbegotten.

They are swindling the people.

UPDATE: And apparently the once-mighty Newsweek can be shamed into decency; Kwong has been fired.

I’m sure she’ll be off the beach soon.