The other day, I linked to an excellent Strib piece about my friend Sarah Cade – a liberal, millennial, biracial, female “gun nut”.

It’s an interesting story, and one that has to be terrifying Big Left, inasmuch as millennials are more likely to be pro-gun than anti (even after a few months of  puffing up David “Boss” Hogg).

And who should sound off in his sclerotic, concussed manner than our old pal Nick “The Monkey” Coleman.

Coleman – former “big cheese”f and the only liberal columnist too dumb and expensive to be kept on at the Strib, ever – turned his rheumy, sheets-to-the-windy eye to the piece with the same even handed logic that made him every blogger’s favorite kick-toy from 2002 until…well, until he pretty much disappeared.

Well, thanks, Nick.  Your opinion is worth – well, pretty much the same as the last ten years worth of your career prospects, ever since you graduated from “Moronic Clown” to “Turbo Clown”.

Kanye “George W. Bush Hates Black People” West – has caused one of the more glorious meltdowns by revealing himself as an old white man.

Bill Whittle:

Money quote:

“If black support for Democrats drops below 85%, the Democrat party ceases to exist”.

Oh, and the money shot – one that surprised even me?

How can I tell it’s hitting home?

A liberal acquaintance referred to West as “the Justin Bieber of hip-hop”.

When they turn to name-calling…

Nine Burger Kings close in the metro and Saint Cloud.

Is there any wonder why?

I think not.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Chinese invented gunpowder, everybody knows that.  Traders spread firearms technology from China to the Middle East and eventually to Western Civilization from which the Founders were descended.

“Guns are now responsible for 75% of killings in America” claims the recent headline.  The implication is that banning guns will end killing.

Thoughts:

First, what was responsible for killings before guns were invented?  The West only obtained guns 500 years ago.  Were there no killings earlier?  None at the time of the Norman Conquest?  None during the Roman Empire?  None before Christ?  That doesn’t square with my recollection of history.

Second, if guns only cause 75% of the killings, what causes the other 25%?  Doesn’t the existence of non-gun killings undermine the claim that guns are responsible for killings?

What if the gun itself isn’t responsible for the killing, what if some human being is responsible for the killing and the gun is merely the tool he used?  After all, Cain didn’t have a gun but Able is just as dead.  What if we’re confusing “cause” for “effect” and thereby placing responsibility for the killing on the wrong thing?

What if?

Leftist adulation for Ruth Bader Ginsburg grows to Tulip Fever proportions:

Amy Wallace, a 34-year-old attorney in Minneapolis, got a Rosie the Riveter-inspired RBG sleeve last year, which had a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the new film.

“Justice Ginsburg is my only personal hero, and as an atheist, my adoration of her is the closest thing I get to personal worship,” she told Refinery29. “The secular iconography of Rosie the Riveter mashed up with Justice Ginsburg seemed like a perfect articulation of the way I feel about her.” The idea for it came after seeing someone else’s tattoo of Our Lady of Guadalupe with a modern, feminist twist (A.K.A. standing inside a vulva instead of surrounded by a religious halo).

Let’s give credit where credit is due – the Strib’s Richard Chin did an excellent piece on my good friend Sarah Cade yesterday.

Cade is described as a  “young, biracial and passionately liberal…gun nut” – and is a great face for the changing population of shooters and 2nd Amendment activists in Minnesota.

Cade, a millennial from Maplewood, didn’t come from a hunting family or grow up around guns. In fact, she’s been a gun owner for only about five years. Still, she’s trying to be a new, nonthreatening face for gun rights advocacy in Minnesota.

Sarah Cade with the AR-15 platform gun she customized herself.
She writes pro-gun op-ed articles and testifies at legislative hearings. She lobbies her legislator, gets quoted in newspaper articles and interviewed on podcasts. She debates people online, speaks at public forums and appears in gun rights advocacy videos.

In many ways, she defies the stereotype of a Second Amendment crusader.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Of course, I think the notion that the opinions and values of middle-aged white guys are so devalued these days – we’ve done a lot of good for society – but I think it’s important that defending the 2nd Amendment become a priority for people other than, well, us.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If the Palestinians heed Saudi Arabian advice to cut a deal with Israel, President Obama should get another Nobel Peace Prize.

You will recall that Obama and his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, proclaimed their intention to raise gas prices to European levels to compel Americans to drive less and thereby emit less carbon dioxide, which would save the planet from global warming.  To force gas prices higher, the President refused to issue permits for oil companies to extract oil from federal lands using conventional drilling methods.

In response, oil companies were forced to develop a new technology – fracking – to extract oil from lands where they already had permits.  Extracting that oil caused a glut in the oil market, which brought down oil prices worldwide, which has cut into the profits of Middle East oil-producing nations, who no longer can afford to subsidize Palestinians to terrorize Israel.  Thus, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently told Palestinians to accept the United States’ peace proposal because Palestine is not a top priority for Saudi Arabia: it’s focused on Iran.

Yes, yes, the Trump Administration will try to tell you that Jared Kushner made it happen and Trump will try to claim credit for himself, but it’s immediately obvious that Barak Obama did not accidentally bring about the exact opposite result he intended; rather, he achieved his secretly intended outcome by implementing the wise policies he carefully crafted a decade ago.

It’s high time President Obama got an award for the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

Just remember – today’s conservative parody is tomorrow’s CNN/New Yorker headline.

A longtime friend of the blog writes:

This from MPR – a loving puff piece about the wonderfulness that Ms Bender plans for Mpls (and coming soon to a neighborhood near you)
check out her credentials (mid article) she is committed to solving 21st century problems with 19th century city planning.

When looking at politics in Minneapolis (and, soon, Saint Paul), remember – Betsy Hodges is no longer mayor because she wasn’t far enough to the left for the city’s dominant strain of the DFL.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hornady has the right idea.

 

“We recently noted the thinly-veiled threat that New York State comptroller Thomas J. DiNapoli made when he sent a friendly letter to most of the nation’s largest financial institutions. In it, he hinted — wink, wink — that it could be bad for their business if they continue to facilitate transactions that involve firearms an

And they should expand the program to cover cops and private security firms who protect these guys, too.

 

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/shock-banks-credit-card-cos-to-start-monitoring-gun-purchases

 

as well as these guys and all their members:

The prior week, the American Federation of Teachers announced it would cut ties with Wells Fargo over what it said was the bank’s failure to discuss with the union its relationship with the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.”

Might be time for firearms manufacturers to take a page out of Microsoft’s book.  You don’t own that firearm.  You have a license to use that firearm.   We can revoke the license if you engage in conduct prejudicial to the firearms industry.  You must turn in the firearm and we’ll reimburse you for the depreciated value of it.  Find someone else to sell you a gun.

Joe Doakes

It’s time for the good guys to make it hurt for the bad guys.

I took a very very rare Saturday off from the NARN (with a pre-recorded show) to attend the big gun rights rally last weekend.

The rally – co-sponsored by the MN Gun Owners’ Caucus, the NRA and the RNC – drew around 3,000 people.  The Strib, sure as can be, called it “hundreds”; it was just like 2004 all over again.

There was a throng of great speakers – but I didn’t get to do much listening.  I was a zone captain, leading a group of marshals that were watching out for ringers and troublemakers in the area in front of the stage.  It was packed, of course – I logged 10,000 steps in the 2.5 hours I was going back and forth across the area.   The only “trouble”…well, we’ll come back to that.

The event was a huge success – and needs to be even bigger, if we’re going to show the legislature, the media, and Big Left who is boss.  But the human rights crew were the big winners.

The biggest losers?  The media – who largely beclowned themselves:

• Channels 4 and 5 spent more time interviewing the four criminal-safety advocates who held a “picnic” 100 hards away from the group than they spent interviewing actual attendees.
• Channel 9’s coverage focused on the one, single, solitary Confederate flag that showed up, as well as interviewing the least well-spoken people they could find.  Their slant was nauseating, and their reporter  – who was visibly upset by being around gun owners – was unforgiveable.  Channel 9 may be an even bigger DFL PR firm than Channel 11.
• Minnesota Public Radio’s coverage was relatively fair on the surface – but word surfaced that they’re working on a story trying to tie gun rights groups to “racism”.  And I’m sure you could find racists there – heck, they’re everywhere, including among the public radio audience.

One (?) anti-gunner tweeted out a predictable “It looks like a lot of old white men”.   Which was an intetersting non-observation observation; two of the speakers were black, two were women, one was a Hawaiian native.  The crows was as white as, well, Minnesota at large (and as the critic) – but I saw black, Latino, native, Pacific islander, and many Asian attendees; the rally was vastly more racially diverse than any “Protect” MN or Moms Want Action meeting.

Feel the diversity!

Not to mention reps from the Pink Pistols – the gay self-defense group.

And the most striking thing I noticed?

Most gun rallies I’ve been to have in fact been overwhelmingly male – because shooters are overwhelmingly male.

But this year, for the first time, I noticed women coming to the event.  They streamed in in twos and threes and in small groups of women (along with countless others who came apparently with their significant others), and largely kept a low profile – fewer t-shits and flags, but lots of listening and participation and – the important part – signing up with the MNGOC and the NRA.

Big Left is terrified of groups like this – because they know that:

1. 3,000 of the good guys has more political effect than 30,000 of their people – because the good guys come to play for keeps.  Most lefty marchers are out to see and be seen and skip school and hit on babes and in quite a few cases earn a few bucks.  The shooters?  They’re in it for freedom.  There’s no contest.
2. Notwithstanding the Parkland students’ carefully coiffed media presence, younger people are pro-gun.  We saw that at the rally, too – lots of young people, male and female.  The next generation is promising.

Of course, there’s a way to go.  If you’re a shooter, you need to stand up and be heard – and never stop it.  The orcs are doing whatever they can to sap your freedom; they need to be smacked down every session, every hearing, every bill, every day.

Saturday was a good start.

Millennials are drifting to the right, according to that noted conservative tool Reuters:

The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.

Although nearly two of three young voters polled said they do not like Republican President Donald Trump, their distaste for him does not necessarily extend to all Republicans or translate directly into votes for Democratic congressional candidates.

Will it continue? We’ll see.

I think there’s a decent chance. Part of it is the inevitable rightward drift of adulthood.

And part of it?

Work with me, here.

“Millennials” grew up during the Great Recession. And one of the iconic bits of escapism during that time has been the series The Walking Dead – a show whose moral is “the world is not a safe space; merit is survival.”

I don’t want to overplay a Hollywood entertainment as sociology – but as Breitbart said, politics is downstream of culture.

UPPER MIDDLE CLASS NPR-LISTENING WHOLE FOODS SHOPPING DEMOCRATS FROM GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS WITH “GOOD SCHOOLS”:  “The problem with Republicans is that they’re just so racist”.

EVENTS:  “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Upper Middle Class Democrat from a Nice Neighborhood:  We’re going to fulfill a liberal goal and start busing your kids and seriously integrating your school district”.

UPPER MIDDLE CLASS NPR-LISTENING WHOLE FOODS SHOPPING DEMOCRATS FROM GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS WITH “GOOD SCHOOLS”:  “No – we’re the good kind of racist!”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

They pay burger flippers nearly $12 per hour now.  The workers went union for a fair wage.

Bad news, people.  The fair wage for someone whose only marketable skill is flipping burgers is $10.  They were overpaying to keep the union out.  Now they’ll agree to raise wages but that will force layoffs to balance the budget.

There will be one guy working for $100 an hour but the rest of you will be replaced by a burger-flipping machine.  I predict bankruptcy in three years.

Joe Doakes

The story is from Portland – which seems to believe, these days, that if you vote for something hard enough, you’re enttitled to it.

The “Republican Farmer Labor” caucus picked a logo that looks suspiciously like the logo of another state organization that has (not coincidentally) nothing to do with farms or (non-government) labor:

The DFL has sent a “Cease and Desist” to the RFL.

Now, if I were the RFL’s lawyer, I’d response demanding that the DFL stop falsely pretending to represent farmers or non-government workers.

Which brought up an interesting question:  since 2/3 of the Democrat Farmer Labor party’s name is now obsolete, what should the party be called these days?

I’m taking nominations.

I’ll start out:

• The Democrat Academic Plutocrat (DAP) Party.
• The Democrat Academic Government Whole Foods Shopper Party (DAGWF)
• The Democrat People Who Think John Oliver Is The Dreamiest Party (DQPTJOITD)

Others?

Donald Trump, 1999:

Donald Trump’s October 24, 1999 Meet the Pressinterview with Tim Russert is a historically illuminating flash forward to the most surprising, promising and history-altering opportunity since the Soviet Union collapsed: “denuclearizing” North Korea without the could-be belligerents waging a hideously destructive war that scars East Asia and seeds a global economic depression…In the interview, Russert says Trump once indicated if he were president he would attack North Korea preemptively in order to end its nuclear threat.

Despite Russert’s vapors and wailing, Trump’s grammatically-challenged beer and barbecue answer is a superb twofer. One: Trump answers Russert’s core question. Two: Trump accurately summarizes the American government’s spaghetti-spined responses to North Korea’s slow but insidious quest for nuclear weapons.

World, today:

On March 5, remarkable news broke: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un said he is willing to discuss denuclearizing his regime. He made no demand on South Korea and the U.S., other than that they meet to discuss the subject face to face. The South Korean delegation that met with him in Pyongyang indicated Kim said he understood South Korean and American joint military drills would continue. That was a major concession. For decades the Communist state’s propagandists have portrayed allied military exercises as preparations for an invasion of the North. In exchange for negotiations, the Kim regime would demand the allies suspend exercises. Not this time. Moreover, the dictatorship also agreed to halt its provocative nuclear weapons and missile tests while talks continue.

Why, it’s almost as if Winston Churchill was right all along; the only thing tyrants and bullies understand is strength.

Go figure.

I’m proudly on record as a Trump skeptic – but between Gorsuch, his cabinet, his deregulatory frenzy, and the unspooling, unprecedented changes in Saudi Arabia (and its various clients) and now the Korean Peninsula, I’m warming up to at least the foreign policy side of The Donald.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Not enough houses. We need to build more. And people can’t afford them because they have too much student loan debt from worthless college degrees. We need to subsidize mortgages again, just like before the last real estate crash.
The answer to social engineering failures is never to stop social engineering. The failures only prove that the agenda was not implemented sufficiently. This time, it will be different.
Wondering if the Narrative may be flawed doesn’t make you intelligent, it makes you a hater. Why is that?
Joe doakes

The problem with Narratives is, eventually you have to prop ’em up with bread and circuses.

Join me from 1-3PM today for a very, very rare pre-recorded episode of the NARN.

Today:

• Dave Fergus of C12 Twin Cities On the impending labor shortage and watch business people can do about it
• Since one of our state representative asked: my personal testimony about gun violenc

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• FM107.5 in the West Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narnshow)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Tomorrow is the Gun Owners Rally at the Capitol.

Big Left has sunk a lot of money into Minnesota, thinking they can roll back the 2nd Amendment rights for the law abiding that the good guys have won over the past 20 years.

It’s our chance to show just how wrong they are.

How important do I think it is?  I produced an entire NARN show in advance to make time for it.

Hope you can be there.  Look me up.

A long-time friend of the blog writes:

I am so sick of hearing about things that millennials will “never have.” I am not that much older and I don’t think things were all that much different when I was in college, renting or buying a house. Perhaps the difference is in mindset- I didn’t expect to afford rent on apartments with marble countertops and rooftop spas when I was earning minimum wage just out of college. I didn’t expect my house to be perfect, either. I just needed it to be structurally sound. Sweat equity was fine.

To the point in this post that the market isn’t working for millennials, I would say it is to a fault. Millennials are demanding perfection, to move in to brand new, high end amenities. They won’t settle for less. Most of the rest of us have pkaces to live, or want to move up, as generations have before us. That millennials are refusing to rent or buy affordable housing, which in turn is being torn down to build luxury and market rate units is the market working. The affordable housing was there for millennials who wanted to start out like the rest of us. But, because they won’t buy or rent it, there is no market for affordability. That they “won’t have houses” is really just their own choices. Kinda like “we can’t pay our college debt ever” when they choose to get multiple degrees from the most expensive colleges in non-marketable skills, like fine arts, literature, etc.

I don’t mind people getting “non-marketable” skills, provided they don’t whine about their prospects after graduation (or show me their draft notice they got before being taken against their will to study Womens’ Studies at Oberlin).

What I’ve noticed?  They seem to collect maladies and diagnoses the way they used to collect Pokemon.

Maybe some – how do you say… – realignment of priorities is in order?

A year and a half of Donald Trump is bringing out “Progressivism’s” innate tendency toward violence:

Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.

Instead, like the French revolutionaries’ Committee on Public Safety, the unhinged anti-Trumpists assume that they have lost public opinion, given their venom and crudity, and are growing desperate as every legal and paralegal means of removing Trump is nearing exhaustion. Robert Mueller is the last chance, a sort of Watergate or Abu Ghraib that could gin up enough furor to drive down Trump’s poll favorability to the twenties and thereby reduce his person to a demonic force deserving of whatever it gets.

And while the genie was never really in the bottle, it’s going to be much harder to get control of “them” when we finally have to.

If we ever do.

Now, I’ll cop to two facts: First, I’ve gone back and forth about Kanye West – he’s a talented rapper (yes, there is such a thing, and if you haven’t tried to do it, by all means do before you let your aesthetics and subjective preferences drive you to write a rhetorical check facts can’t cash) and a gargantuan ego; an open Christian (in a way similar to Prince, in some ways) and a deeply profane person; he interests and repels me in equal measure, depending on when you catch me.

Second:  I’ll profess some bemusement at all the conservative figures who’ve adopted him as a hero in the past week, since he came to the defense of Candace Owens, a black conservative woman who’s been mixing it up with Back Lives Matter.

As we’ve noted in the past – if there’s one thing Big Left hates more than its enemies, its apostates.  Lenin killed the Mensheviks before he got to the White Russians; Hitler had to deal with Ernst Röhm before he went after the dissident clergy, gays and Jews.  ISIS kills “apostate” Muslims before they bother with Christians and Jews.

And American “Progressives” have to slime women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays or any other of “Their” groups who leave the One True Political Faith.

Which, it would seem, Kanye West did in defending a Trump-supporting black woman; Big Left is fully engaged in tearing down what they think they built.  (Yes, West is a provocateur, and it’s entirely likely his “conversation” to “supporting” a conservative will last just as long as Charles Barkley’s did.  But that’s not the point, here).

It’s true for little left, too.

Jamar Nelson – who is a talk show host on the lesser talk station – had this to say about Kanye West yesterday:

I tried to ask Mr. Nelson – who is one of the MNDFL’s leading public intellectuals, and I mean that sincerely – who determined what was “at the expense of the black community”?  And if perhaps unthinking loyalty to a party that’s earnestly worked to keep that community in poverty for two generations now might not be an “expense” to that community as well.

I got nothing, nor will I, but as the great journalist Gretzky said, you get no answers to 100% of the questions you don’t ask.

I’m just trying to find a unit if time short enough to measure how long it’d take to get a Salem host off the air who wrote something like that.

…for now.  And, truth be told, will probably always stay that way.

After years of publishing distorted headlines, slanted news articles, and heavily biased news coverage, media giant CNN announced Friday that it has decided to launch a spinoff site that focuses on real news comprised of objective facts.

Dubbed “CNN: Real,” the site is designed to bring the news media empire into the arena of publishing real news, a step away from its roots as a channel that covers entirely fabricated stories and shamelessly spins all news into liberal talking points.

Up next – a spinoff Strib that isn’t a glorified DFL PR firm.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We changed the formula for Oxycontin to prevent addicts using it.  So they switched to heroin.  Now they’re dying in droves, which means the problem is solving itself.  I’m having trouble seeing the problem.

Joe Doakes

Enh, not if it’s one of my relatives.

But it never fails amaze me that government never, ever figures out the whole “unintended consequenes” thing.

After the Strib released their  propaganda poll earlier in the week, the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun criminal-safety clicque swung into gear.

As anti-gun mean girl  Erin Maye Quade (DFL Apple Valley)  staged a faux “sit in” for the cameras, “Protect” MN put out a call to action to get people down to the Capitol to support the DFLers’ little “spontaneous” tantrum,

And here’s what they did:

“Protect” Minnesota calls in the fury! Photo courtesy Brent Armsden.

Simple fact about these polls – when you ask people who don’t know the issue a hopelessly broad question, most will say “yes” because doing something sounds better than doing nothing.

Right?

But broad questions and “Um, maybes” don’t translate into action on election day.

Or on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon:

Photo courtesy Brent Armsden.

Now, gun rights advocates aren’t big protesters.  But hopefully we all make an exception Saturday.  The state’s gun rights groups are joining forces to hold a rally on the south steps of the Capitol.

I’m pre-recording a show so I can be there.  Hope you can make it too.

Details here.

…for now.

When dealing with Big Left, today’s satire is tomorrow’s threat.