My hypothesis: “Progressive” politicians can say anything, no matter how outlandish or false, not only because they know the media will nearly never call them on it, but – more importantly – because they know people who are susceptible to voting for them are gullible, lacking in critical thinking skills, and so poorly-informed and in curious that they’ll never know better.

Data point: Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez claims President “disrespected” [1] her by calling her AOC.

Experiment: Does she make “AOC” a part of her public persona?

Observation: Why yes, she does! #Unexpected

Conclusion: AOC isn’t a gullible rube. She can merely count on anyone who takes her seriously to be a gullible rube.

[1] If you use “disrespect” as a verb, I dis-hear and dis-care-for, and have no respect for, anythingi else you have to day. Disrespect is an adjective.

During election season, I get lots of robocalls encouraging me to get out and vote for The People’s Choice, The Working Man, the guy who struggled his way up and wiil take on the big special interests. They’re annoying, but they’re seasonal, so I can put up with them.
What puzzles me are the other robocalls. The IRS has levied a judgment on my Social Security account. My automobile warranty is about to expire. I can get rid of my timeshare condo without paying any fees. I’m paying too much for health insurance.
I can see where get-out-the-vote calls might actually make a difference, but honestly, how many of these other robocalls can possibly connect with a person gullible enough to call and give out their personal information?
If these calls are targeting the elderly, the ignorant, the vulnerable, then they are particularly heinous and the government should be doing something about them. Since they’re not, I’m going to step up and offer my services. I’ll issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to anyone who wants to go head hunting, you can keep the loot you collect, and I will pay a bounty for each telemarketers head delivered to my doorstep. No CODs.
Joe Doakes

Phone spam strikes me as supremely counterproductive (outside the few cases Joe notes). But it must be working somewhere, or why would people be doing it?

Larry Jacobs got dunked hard over this tweet last week:

I’m going to come to Professor Jacobs’ (partial, and let’s be honest, largely comic) defense.

I suspect he’s referring to the Uptown Bar. Which was at one point one of the most popular bars in Uptown, which is “in a college town” in the sense that Minneapolis has several colleges in it (rather than, say, Morris or Mankato or even my hometown). It was certainly a place to see and be seen back in the day – and I certainly saw and was seen there, a couple of lifetimes ago.

But it closed in 2009. Long before Covid.

It was replaced, by the way, by an Apple Store.

Which announced its impending closure last week, in the middle of a hamfisted lockdown and the Uptown neighborhood’s descent into crime and violence. While urbanists claim “stores close all the time in Uptown”, citing a number of flavor-of-the-month boutiques and restaurants, I’ll hasten to remind you – in the middle of a neighborhood full of hipsters with enough disposable income to, well, live in Uptown, it was an Apple Store.

And it’s gone. #Unexpectedly.

We interrupt this blog post for a song, which is not remotely thematic, nosirreebob.

Or, more to the point, Nosirree Bob:

Oh, yeah. The establishment in Dr. Jacobs’ tweet is…

…er, was the Uptown Theater. One of the signal arthouse theaters in Minneapolis, a place with some of my most treasured movie experiences.

But it’s gone, too.

Hey, how about another song?

Seems appropriate.

I have two observations about Joe Biden’s performance in last Thursday’s debate.

First – his campaign is all platitudes. He has a “plan” for everything. A government “plan” and three bucks will get you a cup of Caribou. It’s all there to gull the gullible.

Second – like all Democrats, he can pretty much say any billshut he wants, because his voters are all low-information drones who have the critical thought skills of herd animals, and the media like it that way.

There were many examples of this during the debate on Thursday – “I never said I’d ban fracking”, “nobody lost their plan to Obamacare”, and on and on.

The one that made me jump out of my seat with the most incredulity? “We had a great relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe”.

He was half right. The US had a lousy relationship [1] with the Nazi regime – to FDR’s rare credit

The U.S. didn’t have a good relationship with Hitler before he “invaded Europe. The German dictator was, however, beloved in certain quarters, including the editorial offices of the New York Times.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t attack Hitler directly before the war began, but relations between the U.S. and Nazi Germany were by no means good. In September 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler lecturing him about the importance of keeping the peace and stating: “The conscience and the impelling desire of the people of my country demand that the voice of their government be raised again and yet again to avert and to avoid war.” Implying that Hitler was a warmonger was hardly a hallmark of cordial relations between the two countries.

Failing to get a satisfactory response from Hitler, on October 11, 1938, Roosevelt announced that he was increasing national defense spending by $300 million (over $5 billion in today’s dollars). No one thought that money was going to build up our defenses against Britain and France.

But the New York Times? They loved them some Hitler:

The historian Rafael Medoff recently noted that on July 9, 1933, just over five months after he became Chancellor of Germany and years after his virulent anti-Semitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi in its one-sidedness, myopia, and disdain for essential facts.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she was an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, as in the presence of this man whose name has become justly synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator.”

As if that weren’t enough, she continues with a description of the Führer as outlandish and adulatory as likening the supremely zaftig Stacy Abrams to a supermodel: “His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

This, of course, as Walter Duranty was all but french-kissing Joseph Stalin. The NYTimes were equal-opportunity up-suckers.

It wasn’t just the NYTimes, of course – Time named Hitler their “Man of the Year” in 1938:

Although as Time laboriously clarifies:

That choice abided by the dictum of TIME founder Henry Luce, who decreed that the Man of the Year — now Person of the Year — was not an honor but instead should be a distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse. In case that second criterion was lost on readers, the issue that named Hitler dispensed with the portrait treatment that cover subjects typically got. Instead he was depicted as a tiny figure with his back to the viewer, playing a massive organ with his murdered victims spinning on a St. Catherine’s wheel.

Which, in context, makes sense.

Moreso than the NYTimes’ excuse, anyway.

[1] Speaking generally in re the government, of course. Some in the government – Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to the UK, Democrat eminimento and father of progressive icons John F. and Robert F. Kennedy – spent the early years of the war pulling for the Nazis to conquer the Brits, whom he hated.

I’d like a list of the 25 former GOP members who crossed the aisle to keep Governor Walz’ one-man-regime in power, in exchange for endorsements from trade unions who will benefit from the spending bill.

Please include home addresses, so I can send fruit baskets to thank them for selling out the people of Minnesota.

Joe Doakes

Not gonna lie – and if you are a MNGOP staffer, by all means feel free to pass this on to Jennifer Carnahan, Paul Gazelka and Kurt Daudt – but the whole “acting like DFLers” thing wasn’t amusing even before the state got swallowed up in a DFL coup.

It’s not been an easy few weeks to be a Minnesota Repubican.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Lacy Johnson, GOP candidate to replace Ilhan Omar in the Fifth Congressional District.
• Jason Lewis, candidate to replace Tina Smith in the US Senate.

I’ll be on from 1-3PM. You can find the show on:

• AM1280 or FM 107.5 in the Twin Cities
• Streaming
• Podcast

Or use your favorite streaming apps!

Join us at 651-289-4488, or on Twitter at #NARNShow.

I may owe Ryan Winkler an apology.

I mean, growing up in rural North Dakota back when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, even I knew what “uncle Tom” meant when applied to a black man – so naturally I figured someone in his position, Harvard grad and all, would as well. Clearly, so did many others.

And although I’m an Anglo from the northern Plains, I’ve known what a Coyote – a slang term for a human trafficker who brings people across the border, either as illegal immigrants, sex slaves or mules – was for quite a while now.

But apparently a Harvard education does one no better in this context:

Y’know what’s “sickening”? Having a bunch of people whose opinion is considered above the rest of the world by dint of being a “blue check”, who are given to lecturing the deporables about their cultural illiteracy, who are themselves so culturally illiterate:

Just remember that when Blue America starts talking about getting rid of the electoral college.

Biden: “I’ll raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but have the government bail out all the businesses that can’t afford it”.

Also Biden: “Don’t you DARE call me a socialist”.

Jeffrey Toobin – caught on his own camera doing some, er, internal polling earlier this week – doesn’t have the problem.

All of you who are complaining that he was seen, non-social distancing, during a work meeting – you are the ones with the problems!

And that’s also what everyone is going to remember about Jeffrey Toobin, I’m afraid. But that says more about us than it does about him.

According to a 2016 survey, 95% of men and 81% of women in America have masturbated. Yet in the same poll, over half of respondents said they felt uncomfortable talking about it.

So we joke about it, instead, which relieves our anxieties but reinforces the taboo. Witness the outpouring of juvenile humor over the past two days about “Toobin his own horn,” his “sticky situation,” and so on.

Well, there was the little matter that he was “going on his third date with Rachel Maddow” or “universal gun registration” or “nationwide mask mandates” [or whomever it is that “progressive” guys think about while in flagrante solo] during a work meeting. On camera. A nation full of people who’ve been stuck on Teams or Zoom meetings (if we’re lucky) for seven months and joking about people not wearing pants “to work” are suddenly seeing how our self-appointed “elites” spend their time.

So of course you’re the one with the problem.

Fernandez writes about the urge to escape confinement, and how it’s universal. Even throws in a Shawshank Redemption quote. He labels it “rebellion,” a word that implies the authorities are right and the rebels are wrong.

Close, but no cigar. His analysis doesn’t distinguish the need to escape UNJUST confinement, which was what occurred in that film, and has occurred with all the lock-downs.

“Cases” are skyrocketing despite lock-downs and mask orders, but “deaths” are not, and particularly not among children, teens, young adults and working people. That means universal house arrest is not necessary, never was. We’re being punished for no good reason. That’s unjust confinement.

The urge to escape unjust confinement is not only natural, it’s right and moral and just. It’s not an act of rebellion against lawful authority. The people trying to continue the unjust confinement are in the wrong, not those of us trying to escape it.

Joe Doakes

I’ve got a mother in memory care. I’ll be protecting her (and/or going along with her facility’s plans for taking care of her), whatever it takes.

I’m also going to get a ^%$#@ social life back.

Both can be done.

Usual disclaimers about “the only poll that counts is on November 3 [1] inserted here.

But pessimist that I am, I really didn’t see this coming

KSTP/SURVEYUSA: Tina Smith 43%; Jason Lewis 42%; 12% undecided; 3% people other. Confidence Interval +/- 5%. Smith had 11-point lead in September and 7-point lead earlier this month. pic.twitter.com/mX91q0MI6X

— Tom Hauser (@thauserkstp) October 21, 2020

Fluke?

Polls finding more-likely voters, ones who’ve actually been paying attention?

We’ll see.

I’ve heard more than a few fellow D-list pundits exclaim disbelief at “12% undecided”. I’m going to chalk that up to some misdirected Pauline Kael syndrome, from people who “write”/tweet about politics constantly, thinking everyone is the same as they are. Smith has tried hard to follow A-Klo’s model of being innocuous and invisible. We’ll see if it works.

Lewis beating the Butcher Of Vandalia would be an early Christmas present.

[1] And, let’s be honest, as we saw in 2008 and 2010, it still may not count, really, but let’s try not to go completely down the rabbit hole.

From the “Bitter Barrista” comedy videoblog, we get what may be the most perfect, if coarse, response to the excesses of modern authoritarian therapeutic culture. (Language occasionaly NSFW).

First, the vid:

Then, the line:

“Has it ever occurred to you that that it’s no one else’s responsibility to make sure that you’re emotionally stable? But you can’t comprehend that, can you? Because being an alleged victim of circumstances is the only identity that you possess. You use minor inconveniences to belittle other people just so you can inflate your own sense of self-importance, because you’ve never actually accomplished shit in your life. And if you were to take that time to look inwards to reflect, you would weep at the pathetic puddle you’ve reduced the confines of your life to. Then again, life was never a game of rock, paper, a scissor, where logic doesn’t always defeat entitled bitch! By the way, I called you Karen because I’m a nice person. What I mean is C__t”

When you apply this to so many peoples’ responses to so many of life’s travails – quarantining, the results of the last Presidential election, any sort of cognitive dissonance in education, society or the workplace – it really is perfect.

I suspect Bitter Barista is affiliated with Black Rifle Coffee Company, which can only be a good thing. And it’s one of the funniest channels on Youtube, which is a low bar, I know, but it jumps it with style.

Wouldn’t it be funny to hear her say, “No, I do not own A gun. Not one single, solitary gun. I own a Mighty Shitload of guns, and have ammo for all of them! So There!”

Joe Doakes

As long as she drags the SCOTUS into giving strict scrutiny to gun rights cases, I don’t care if she’s got her grandpa’s .25 automatic diassembled in different parts of her house.

But Joe’s right – ACB having a collection that rivals Ted Nugent’s would be pretty cool.

…the nation turns its lonely, topical limerick and haiku writing eyes to you. And Ryan Rhodes.

But since Foot is retired and Ryan is MIA, we’ll have to fill in ourselves.

There once was a fellow named Toobin
(Don’t confuse him with Jennifer Rubin).
His career met its doom,
when he dropped trou on Zoom
Now there’s a different part getting the lube-in.

Toobin takes “lid” off,
Two weeks’ frenzy erupts, as
Biden’s lid stays on.

So Toobin had fun of the kind,
the nuns said would make you go blind.
But there’s no point in moping,
it’s just Jeff’s way of hoping
for less trouble than the conjugal kind.

Carry on.

Aaaaaah.

It makes sense now.

As a typical rural scandinavian by upbringing, “optimism” comes hard for me.

This election is no exception.

Same as the last one, really. Those who were listening to the NARN on election night 2016 may recall that when I saw Wisconsin drop in the hoop for the President, I was briefly speechless, and my head started swimming. Being speechless is a bad thing on talk radio – so I said the only thing I could think of: “I think someone slipped LSD in the cucumber water, here at the Radisson Blu”.

Such was the cognitive dissonance.

Anyway – call it being of Norwegian descent; call it the political fatalism that comes from being a conservative in a moldy blue city for 35 years; call it whatever you want. I see the evidence of the enthusiam gap in Trump’s favor – but am sort of wired, by this point, to think that whatever the transiet passions of suburban soccer moms don’t screw up, the Democrat fraud machine will.

And that bothers me a lot more this year than it did four years ago, because as awful a president as Killary would have been, she was a known-ish quantitiy. If you liked Slick Willy with a dose of hectoring harpy on top, you could deal with her.

Slow Joe? He’s nothing but a delivery system for The Squad, via their competent aunt Kamala.

But it’s a lost cause. The polls prove it! NPR keeps saying so.

Well, most of the polling.

Trafalgar was the canary in the coalmine four years ago, and they remain resolutely contrarian this go-around as well.

Trafalgar tries to avoid so-called weighting to get the partisan mix of respondents right. A traditional pollster might want to get, say, 35 percent Republicans to have a balanced survey, but he comes up short because Republicans are less likely to respond. If only, say, 22 percent of Republicans answer, they are given additional weight to make up for the shortfall.

“The better you do at getting an even sample,” according to Cahaly, “the less weighting you have to do.”

One problem with weighting is that Republicans “who don’t like Trump can’t wait to answer a poll,” he says. “So immediately, within the 22 percent, they’ve probably overrepresented it, the anti-Trump Republicans, the Never Trumper types. Well, when you weight that up from 22 to 35, now you have skewed an already bad representation sample. So that’s kind of inherently how they can be so off.”

The whole thing is worth a read.

We shall see.

Joe Biden’s really plastering the airwaves with ads. Saw another one. Did you know Trump gave tax cuts to the rich? Yep. Said it right in the ad, so it must be true.

I wonder . . . what are the qualifications to get that tax cut? My wife and I got a check earlier this Spring – $1,200 apiece – was that the tax cut for the rich? I think we also got a bigger refund last year. Maybe that was it?

I have my taxes done by HR Block. You’d think they would have mentioned if I could take advantage of a tax cut. Maybe I’m not rich enough? How rich do you have to be? If Biden is going to take away tax cuts, that means somebody is paying higher taxes. Is it going to be me?

You know, Joe, before I fill in the box next to your name, I’m going to want a few more details on which tax cuts you’re taking back. Care to be more specific?

Joe Doakes

It’s true because shut up.

First it was Kanye West – one of rap’s most consistently creative (and yes, unbalancee) figures. [1], endorsing Trump three years ago.

Then it was Ice Cube – formerly of NWA, and more famous as an actor these days – not so much “endorsing Trump” as asking blacks what the Democrats have done for them lately, and getting a lot of “because shut up” from white progressives as an answer.

And now, Fifty Cent- who realized that under the BIden tax plan he’d just be Thirty Cent:

While I remain resolutely apathetic about celebrities’ political opinions, let’s look below the surface. Say what you will about rap [1], but at a time in the election season when celebs are supposed to be threatening to move to France, you’ve got three incredibly successful black men, actively telling their own community that the party that has considered their votes their property for two generations, doesn’t deserve ’em.

So what? Other than a lot of adenoidal progressive white and academic black critics saying Cube, Kanye and Fifty Cent were never all that good anyway, , I mean?

I’m wondering if part of the reason Biden – who, the media polls tell us, has an eleventy-teen digit lead over Trump in Minnesota – is spending to much money in an ostensibly safe state is the Democrats are worried about the black vote slipping away?

Remember – it’s been estimated that if the Dems’ take of the black vote ever drops below 80%, they are sunk nationwide. Not the whole black vote; one in five.

Is that in striking distance?

Sometimes it seems like everyone in the Twin Cties has a Sid Hartman story.

I had one – 34 years ago. And I can’t believe I never wrote about it in my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series.

I was working as a stringer – an ad-hoc freelance reporter – for WGN in Chicago. My job was to send reports on the game back to WGN – actually, to the show that Dana Carvey, Mike Meyers, John Goodman and Chris Farley lampooned a few years later, in the immortal “Da Bearss” bit – at halftime and at the end of the game.

This game happened to be Tommy Kramer’s best throwing game ever – five touchdowns against Forrest Gregg’s hapless ’86 Packers.

After the game, I walked down into the locker room and was interviewing Kramer, when I saw a mike creep up in front of the quarterback’s face. It was Sid. And he was bogarting the answer to my question.

And I felt a little flattered.

There are other, better Sid stories. This one may be my favorite

Saw another Biden ad. Did you know Trump plans to eliminate Social Security? Really. But never fear, Joe Biden’s got a plan to save it. Good for him. You go, Joe!

Except. . . what, exactly, is that plan? Everybody knows Social Security is insolvent, but as far as I know there are only three solutions and all of them suck, which is why nobody in Washington is pushing them, not even Trump.

We could raise the retirement age high enough that people die before collecting. That would save money.

We could cut benefits low enough that there’d be enough for everybody to get a check, though maybe not enough to live on.

We could raise taxes on our kids’ incomes high enough to fund current benefits and current retirement age, but that would leave our kids destitute.

You know, Joe, before I pull the lever for you, I’m going to need some more details on this ‘plan’ of yours. Care to be more specific?

Joe Doakes

I keep yelling that at my TV/computer, several times a day.

Their pollsters just have to know that “Joe has a plan!” can only resonate with idiots.

Right?

Right?

Remember December 1, 2016?

Maybe not.

But if you don’t, I consider it my mission to make sure that date lives on – dare I say, in infamy.

It was the date that reps from the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms went on the air and told the nation…

…well, the tiny, self-selecting part of the nation that listens to NPR on the weekend – that it was time for the news media to stop playing by the rules that they always told the nation they played by, the whole “telling people the facts and let them draw their own concusions” thing, and started using their power to “de-normalize” President Trump.

And almost four years later, here we are:

Not Martin Van Buren, the most genuinely corrupt president in history.

Not James Buchanan, the inept buffoon who all but sent out engraved invitations to the Civil War.

Not Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton dean who lied about keeping the nation out of war, did more than any other single person to federalize and weaponize Jim Crow and empower the Klan, and launch the bureaucratic state that’s eating the nation alive today.

No. Trump. A coarse populist buffoon who has, nonetheless, pretty much done what he said he’d do (start bringing troops home, revive the economy after the slowest recovery since the Depression, nominate conservative SCOTUS justices), a few nobody expected (roll the ball farther toward peace in the middle east than any president, defeated ISIS), and brought the extreme delusional madness of the left fully out in the open, where (if America is wise) it can be stomped on hard, God willing…

…oh. I get it now.

Talking about Hunter Biden’s addiction is mean to addicts.

Do you know what’s really mean to addicts?

Enabling them

Giving a separate justice system to the powerful.

(Notice how NPR “fact checked” the assertion that Biden was kicked out of the Navy? he got an “administrative discharge” – as if he’d have gotten that had he been a kid from Oklahoma…)

Using them as a misapplied political point.

That’s mean to addicts.

Between the taxes, the delusional city governments and the occasional roaming bands of “Anti”-Fa goons, the thought of leaving the Twin Cities occasionally rears its head.

How far?

This far, perhaps?

I saw an ad on television. Donald Trump only cares about the stock market. He gave tax cuts to the rich. Joe Biden will fix all that.

Stock market – fat cats – rich people. Yeah, screw ’em. Not like it’ll affect my family at all. Go for it, Joe!

Well, except for that IRA that I had from private practice. And my kid’s 401k. My wife’s Deferred Compensation and Health Care Savings Accounts. Those are all invested in the stock market. And they’re not insured like bank accounts so if the market tanks, they lose everything.

Not me. I’m a government employee. We have defined benefit pensions through Minnesota State Retirement, Public Employees Retirement, or Teacher’s Retirement, all of which are administered by the State of Minnesota and prudently invested in . . . the stock market. Which Biden’s going to tank to punish the rich.

Oh, crap.

Joe Doakes

It’s gotten to the point where you hope Biden’s ads are just chanting points to con the gullible.

Tyler Kistner is running for US House in CD2 – the southeast Metro area.

Kendall Qualls is running for the House in CD3.