SCENE:  At the Minnesota State Capitol.  Mitch BERG, laptop in hand, is walking between the House and Senate chambers when he encounters Dorbert AARONSON, chairman of the group “Gun Owners of Minnesota”, a non-profit incorporated in Des Moines, Iowa.

AARONSON:  Excuse me – do you know the way to the Minnesota state capitol?

BERG:  Er – you’re in it.

AARONSON:  Ah.  Sorry.  I just got into Des Moines,

BERG:  Saint Paul.

AARONSON:  Right.  Saint  Paul.  I”m here for a hearing on a gun rights bill.

BERG:  Ah. So am I.  The Constitutional Carry bill.

AARONSON:  Yeah.  We’re supporting the bill that we drew up.  It requires immediate dropping of all firearms regulations.

BERG:   Wow.  Who’s carrying it?

AARONSON:   Nobody has the balls to carry this bill!

BERG:   Wow.  So how’s it ever going to pass?

AARONSON:  It’s not supposed to pass.   It’s supposed to educate the voters.

BERG:   Educate them…that the way to change policy and win freedom is to demand things that are politically impossible?

AARONSON:   You have to have the courage to demand the impossible, and nothing less!  It’s called the Politics of Confrontation, and we are masters of it!

BERG:  Masters of…what?  What bills are you behind the passage of?

AARONSON:   We passed “Shall Issue” carry permitting in 2003…

BERG:  No, you didn’t.  That was GOCRA!

AARONSON:   We passed the Capitol Carry, Silencers, the prohibition against confiscating guns after natural disasters…

BERG:   All of those were the result of GOCRA, MNGOPAC and the MNGOC.  Your group had nothing to do with any of those!

AARONSON:  We educated voters to demand nothing less than everything!

BERG:  But by demanding things that can not ever pass, you open the door for our rights to be further

AARONSON:   Anything less than everything is nothing, and anyone who settles for anything less than everything is a complete sell-out!

BERG:   You mean the legislators bringing the bills today…?

AARONSON:   Sellouts!  Cowards!   Worthless collaborationists!

BERG: So in other words, you and your group are focused exclusively on things that can only be reached incrementally – and you reject incrementalism.  Which means the goals can never be reached.

AARONSON:  Only by people who are worthy!

BERG:  Huh.  But if it can never be reached, and you keep fundraising forever on the issue…

AARONSON:  Pretty sweet deal, huh?

BERG:   Huh.  Yes.  Yes it is.

AARONSON:  See this watch?  It’s a Rolex, wrapped around another Rolex.

BERG:  Pretty cool.

And SCENE.

(NOTE:  Any similarities between the fictional character above and the Iowa-based “Minnesota Gun Rights” are purely coincidental, and probably unintentional.  Honest).

Kurt Schlichter notes that “You Can Tell What Leftists Are Doing By What They Accuse Conservatives Of Doing”

Sound familiar?  Of course it does.

I caught this on MPR last week; arts reporter Marianne Combs’s piece on the new season at the Guthrie, featuring the new “Trump Derangement” theme:

This fall, the Guthrie will stage Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.” The show deals with the rise of fascism on American soil at the start of World War II, but Haj says it feels startlingly relevant today.

“There’s a line in the play that says something like, ‘We don’t send people back — we’re Americans. That’s not what we do.’ And that line was written in 1941,” Haj said. “The reason we do the classics is not to look at plays or stories under glass; it’s to understand that many of these classic texts have absolute resonances to our current times.”

The Guthrie follows “Watch on the Rhine” with Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” which at first might seem like a non sequitur. But Haj explained that Noel Coward, a contemporary of Hellman, wrote the play at the onset of World War II.

The message – “we, the Guthrie’s artistic directors, believe we’re living in times just like 11933 Germany; we believe our audience is like the British of 1940, who need something to take their mind off being firebombed every night”.

But don’t dare accuse anyone of Trump derangement!

Joe Doakes from Como Parks emails:

Liberal:  There is absolutely no voter fraud; therefore, we do not need an investigation or voter ID law and you’re a hateful racissss for saying so.

 Conservative:  Dozens of non-citizens voted illegally in Ohio.  There were more votes than voters in Detroit.  

 Liberal:  There is voter fraud; but we do not need an investigation or voter ID law and you’re a hateful racisss for saying so.

 As always, Monty Python anticipates real life, in the “Expedition to Lake Pahoe” sketch:

 “ . . . there is no – I repeat, no – cannibalism in the British Navy.  Absolutely none.  And when I say none, I mean that there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit, but all new ratings are warned that if they wake up in the morning and find any toothmarks at all anywhere on their bodies, they’re to tell me immediately so that I can immediately take every measure to hush the whole thing up.”

 Joe Doakes

I think it’s hilarious that George Orwell’s 1984 has re-entered the best-seller list – since it was written about the Western far-left.  And it still may as well be;  the ease and fluency with which the left’s chanting points bots went from “Our electoral system is perfect, and you’re a racist misogynist transphobe traitor to suggest otherwise” to “our electoral system is a shambles” after November 8 would have beggared Orwell’s imagination.

One of the bills being heard tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM at the State Office Building will be HF238 – Rep. Nash’s “Defense of Dwelling and Person Act”, sometimes called “Stand your Ground”.

This is an absolutely vital bill.  Here’s why.

To use lethal force in self defense in Minnesota, you have to meet four criteria:

1. You can’t be a willing participant
2. You need to reasonably and immediately fear death or great bodily harm
3. You can only use enough force to end the threat
4. And, at least outside your home, you have a duty to retreat.

The first three, while somewhat subjective, are relatively clear to most people, it’s this last that causes problems.

What is the “Duty to Retreat?”  How far?

Are you obliged to run away if you have a bad knee?  If your are beset by multiple younger, faster assailants?  If you are part of a group being held at gunpoint?

Those are not idle questions.  As the graphic above points out, there are at least a dozen bits and pieces of case law that govern the “Duty to Retreat” under Minnesota law.  Which one applies to your situation?   If you’re a lawyer, sitting in an office with a subscription to WestLaw, you can probably rustle up the data with a little bit of time, and gather the various interpretations.

If you’re walking to your car through a dark parking lot, and some suspicious character is tailing you?  Less so.

County attorneys like having discretion on these sorts of questions.   It’s wrong, and needs to be stopped.

Last weekend, a group of “anarchists” attacked a pro-Trump rally at the Minnesota State Capitol.    Thugs wearing helmets and masks sucker-punched and kicked unsuspecting peaceful demonstrators, and in one case sprayed mace into a crowd of people.

It was not a spontaneous event; they were quite obviously organized, equipped, and had planned for the event.

They sprayed what was described as “Bear Mace” into a crowd of unsuspecting people – which can easily be a lethal weapon for people with respiratory conditions.   There were six arrests.

The entire fracas was caught on film, in front of dozens of witnesses.  There is not problem showing the violence, brutality and intent of the event.

No matter.  They are aligned with the left against the right.  And in Saint Paul, that’s license to block streets, clog freeways…

…and now, to physically attack people with potentially lethal force.   Ramsey County has declined to charge the arrested protesters – four boys and two girls – with anything.

Monday, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said there were insufficient facts to prove felony-level riot. The attorney’s office said State Patrol has presented the case to the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office for consideration of misdemeanor charges.

That is bullshit, stacked high and deep.

If it were a bunch of rednecks from Isanti County who’d maced the “Womens’ March” a couple weeks ago, they’d still be in jail.

Look at the boys and girls who were arrested.  Check out the names:  Anton.  Isabell.  Linwood.  Those are upper-middle-class white kid names.  Breck School names.  Names that drive Subarus until they get a Volvo.  Names like the children of John Choi’s law school classmates and Chris Coleman’s Crocus Hill and Kenwood cronies have.

It’s the special, deluxe, “for progressives only” justice, part of the “progressives only” school, university, public sector union and non-profit parallel universe of power and privilege that the Big Left in Minnesota gets.

UPDATE:  I’ve seen reports that Linwood Kaine is the son of Hillary Clinton’s VP candidate.

Well, I’m gonna guess there were some lawyers involved, huh?

…until it’s not.

I say that, because it’s a phenomenon that is verging on being a “Berg’s Law”; today’s jokes about the behavior of liberals are tomorrow’s news stories about the behavior of liberals.  I have no doubt that someone in the comment section will, before long, post an article from Mother Jones or Raw Story that reads like the link above – but non-fiction.

It’s fun to make fun of National Public Radio.

The upper-middle-class white liberal bias; the pretentious production style; the air staff’s frequently sloppy, mannered delivery; the unearned condescension to all other media; if you’re a radio person, the massive budgets and huge staffs combined with the often dismal state of practice of the radio craft; the complete inability to do a show off-script (listening to NPR reporters trying to ad-lib on the morning of 9/11 would have been funny under less dire circumstances) – I mean, Terri Gross is considered a brilliant broadcaster because…

…she can freestyle an interview (or at least be made to sound like she’s freestyling after repeated cycles of NPR’s obsessive editing).

It’s fun to make fun of public radio:

For all that?  There are shows I do like.  I enjoyed Prairie Home Companion while Garrison Keillor hosted it (while ignoring and mocking his puerile politics), and might like it even more with Chris Thile at the helm.  MPR’s news does an adequate job of seeking balance – not perfect, not great, but adequate, which means if you grade on a curve against other media they rate an A.   On Being with Krista Tippett can be an incredibly interesting show.

And then there’s been “Splendid Table“.   For a couple decades, now Lynn Rossetto Kasper has been hosting the show – and by “hosting”, I mean “saving it from the suffocating, self-parodying cliches that are most public radio”.    Rossetto Kasper brought an air of engagement, mirth…fun to  the show, and to a subject that inspires all too much leaden foodie navel-gazing.

Brought.

Rossetto Kasper is retiring from the show after 21 seasons.  She’s being replaced by Francis Lam, former top foodie at NYTimes Magazine and an accomplished chef in his own right.  He clearly knows his food.

I got my first, er, taste of Mr. Lam’s style this past weekend.  And it’s dreadful.

I’m going to put part of the blame on whomever produces and edits the show – and being an American Public Media (the production spinoff of MPR) joint, God only kjnows who that is, since like most APM shows it’s got a staff list longer than a Michael Bay movie.  But whoever it is who decided on Mr. Lam’s broadcast style seems to have given the directive; “Don’t just do public radio cliché; define and supercharge them!”.

A paraphrased, but typical, piece of a Lam interview:

LAM:  So tell us about [whatever].

GUEST:  I’m glad you asked.  It’s really about [interesting explanation redacted]

LAM:  Ah.  […several seconds of exaggerated pause, apparently to connote depth and thoughtfulness…].  Interesting.

So yeah, the editing was dreadful.

But Lam himself comes across as…oh, drat, now I have to go into my thesaurus to find new terms to describe the clichés of the public radio delivery.  Lugubrious?  Disconnected?  Stylized to the point of caricature?  I don’t know.

Maybe it’ll improve.  Maybe it was an isolated episode.

Or maybe, in the era of Trump, Public Radio is making a concerted effort to be more pompous, more caricaturish, and less accessible to the plebeians.

Let’s hope for improvement.

Fifty years ago:  rallying for free speech.

Today…:

(Jump ahead to 3:02)

“F*** Free Speech”.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Remember when Al Franken lit into Betsy DeVos over her school choice beliefs?

Some might have thought Franken opposed school choice.   He does, in fact, support school choice.

For those who can afford it.

…the Senator also has very little experience with public schools.

According to an interview with Harvard magazine, Franken was a math and science whiz as a boy. As he approached secondary school years, his parents wanted to find a better school for their gifted student. Franken ended up attending and graduating from Blake, one of the most exclusive private schools in the Minneapolis area, where the tuition for upperclassmen is currently $29,025 per year.

Franken’s two kids also avoided public school. Instead, his kids attended The Dalton School in New York City where tuition is $44,640 per year. Dalton is known for educating celebrities and children of royalty.

Forget about Franken; I sincerely doubt you find the children of many superstar superintendents toiling away in public schools.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

SpaceX announced it would launch two tourists to ride around the Moon in 2018.  Experts say they’ll be in for a rough ride: non-stop vomiting and the constant need to pee.

 So . . . like watching the Ghostbusters reboot, then? 

 Joe Doakes

It’s a fair cop.

Jennifer Carnahan is running for chair of the MNGOP.  Here’s her website.

Here’s Charle’s CW Cooke’s article about the history of “authoritarian” Presidents.

And here’s ♫ today’s music playlist. 

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• Jennifer Carnahan  will join me to talk about her bid for the chair of the MNGOP
• The State of the Trump Union

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard 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
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• 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!

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few weeks/months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was uneasy as he approached the podium in the Reichstag on January 31st, 1917.  Despite having done more than perhaps any other figure in Europe to ensure the Great War, Bethmann-Hollweg’s support for the conflict had slowly dissipated.  Only weeks earlier, the aging Chancellor had been forced to offer the outline of negotiations by rebellious German legislators eager to bring the bloodshed to an end.

Now, Bethmann-Hollweg was finding himself forced to announce a policy he had long fought against – the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.  While the policy had done more to turn the tables of war in favor of Germany than any other action of their armies, Bethmann-Hollweg feared a continued policy of sinking any and all ships would eventually bring the United States into the conflict.  Three weeks earlier, the leaders of Germany’s Navy had met with the Kaiser and implored Wilhelm II to restart submarine operations.  The nation was starving to death and Berlin’s U-boats were the other weapon that could return the devastation of the blockade in-kind.  The Kaiser agreed.

Bethmann-Hollweg told the assembled delegates that the U-boat campaign would renew the following day, February 1st, 1917.  “We have been challenged to fight to the end,” the Chancellor intoned.  “We accept the challenge. We stake everything, and we shall be victorious.”

A submarine’s view of the war – German U-boats would sink tremendous numbers of British commercial vessels during the Great War

For a weapon that nearly decided two World Wars, the Unterseeboot or U-boat was barely a consideration in Germany’s naval program.    Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night on national public radio, I listened to Illinois senator Dick “Turban” Durbin respond to President Trump State of the Union address.

Asked about the Democrat response to republican healthcare initiatives – in this case, the proposal to allow people to buy insurance across state lines – his response was:

“Come on. You think people are going to go to a hospital or a doctor in another state?”

And sure enough, you can see Democrats repeating this on social media today.

Do they not see the difference between “health insurance” and “healthcare”?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mayor of New York wants to build dozens of new homeless shelters.

 Homeless?  What homeless?  Where did all these homeless people come from, all of the sudden?  I didn’t hear anything about homeless for the last eight years.  Trump has only been in office for a month and already, we need to build more homeless shelters?

 And what’s this about clusters?  Seems as if Queens and the Bronx have most of the present homeless sites instead of trendy Manhattan.  I wonder why? 

 And what does this line mean:  “Yet he provided no details about where these shelters will be built, a glaring omission that follows furious protests over the last year when the city tried but failed to locate shelters in some neighborhoods.”

 Hypocritical NIMBYs in New York?  The most Liberal, caring, compassionate, Democrat city in the world? 

 Joe Doakes

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Now that Donald Trump is president, anti-semitism is a topic.

Suddenly.

Because it never existed before January 20, right?

 The press was largely uninterested in December 2010, when 200 tombstones were overturned—an assault just as large as the one in St. Louis—at the aforementioned Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn. There were no fundraisers by Muslim-Americans or anybody. It was covered by the New York Post and Brooklyn weeklies but otherwise largely ignored. Not a word in the Times. To be sure, this was not part of a “wave” of anti-Semitism, such as we have seen. Still, 200 tombstones is 200 tombstones. Two hundred families traumatized, assuming they knew. Not even worth a paragraph? RELATED: What’s Behind the Rash of Anti-Semitic Incidents More recently, outside the pro-Israel echo chamber there was little interest in February 2015, when President Obama said—and his spokesman reiterated—that the attack on a Jewish grocery in Paris by Islamist terrorists was just a “random” attack on a bunch of “folks.” I doubt very much that the press would have accepted such mumbo-jumbo from Donald Trump or Sean Spicer.

I’m waiting for the press to blame Trump for the failure of Obamacare.

Rep. Eric Lucero is a Republican, Latino…

…and is being told to get back on the DFL plantation by race-baiting DFL stooges:

During the Public Safety Policy and Finance Committee Wednesday, Lucero was repeatedly harassed and shouted at, first for not being a person of color, and then after his heritage was established, for being a person of color and not voting with Democrats…A testifier at the committee hearing scolded the committee for “not having a single person of color.” Lucero quickly corrected the testifier, who neither recognized Lucero’s ability to comment on racial issues nor apologized for judging him based on the color of his skin alone.

After the committee voted to pass the legislation, an African American testifier stood up and began shouting remarks at Lucero like, “I’m coming for you indigenous brother!” “Take off your KKK hood!” – calling Lucero a “pawn for the racist game” and telling him he’s “furthering racism.”

I’m sure you can imagine what the Twin Cities media would do if a white person started berating a minority legislator with racist twaddle.

Imagination is all you have in this case:

The major television stations and newspapers in the Twin Cities captured every moment of the exchange, and not one outlet reported on it.

Why would they?  They’re part of the plantation-owning class.

Politifact says President Trump is right…

…rates him “mostly false” anyway.

They don’t “check facts”.  They ensure congruency with the narrative.  No more.

….every so often I read something that shows me exactly why so many people did.

Like this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Wrong winner at the Academy Awards?  Should have kept the sealed envelope in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall’s porch.  Then nobody would know the contents until revealed by Carnac the Magnificent.  Would have been a lot more entertaining.

 Joe Doakes

I’m not one of those sticks in the mud that swears off all Hollywood over a little matter of pervasive arrogant cultural bias…

…but I cant’ imagine much less entertaining than even a well-executed Oscar broadcast.

There’s an ugly, stupid fringe on the edge of all political movements.

Of course, in remembering the deaths of Ronald Reagan, Tony Snow, Gerald Ford, Antonin Scalia and others, it’s seemed like that deranged fringe cuts very close to the center of the Democrat party.

But for one of their own?

Alan Colmes was always the weaker half of the “Hannity and Colmes” line-up.  I suspect that was by design.  Television and radio shows featuring two equals tend to make wonky audiences happy, and bore everyone else silly.    Alan Colmes, I suspect, was supposed to be the New York Generals, to Sean Hannity’s Harlem Globetrotters; the Mister Electricity to Hannity’s Crusher.

Also, and more importantly, he was a human being.

Anyway – that fringe, isolated crank liberal site, Salon, gives Colmes the same treatment Janeane Garofalo and Rosie O’Donnell give departed conservative figures in this incredibly nasty, snarky little obit:

And while one should usually view tributes to the recently departed with a forgiving cynicism[well, no – “one should” ideally not – Ed] in this case they are all too believable: Colmes was the most absurd, useless, and mocked television personality in America for many years, precisely because he was nice. In the context of Fox News, being a nice guy—and a “liberal” nice guy at that—meant being a buffoon, and a patsy. Colmes not only played the part to perfection—he defined it.

Salon “writer” Isaac Chotiner continues the left’s noxious, toxic habit of whizzing on graves.

What a wonderful world.

Or…

…is it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everybody knows the federal budget is out of control.  So how about thinking of creative ways to save money?  Here’s one:

 The Third Amendment says: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

 A member of ISIS fleeting war-torn Syria is no longer a soldier, he’s now a refugee, so there’s no constitutional prohibition to Trump issuing an Executive Order requiring homeowners to take in former ISIS soldiers and provide them with food and shelter, at the homeowner’s expense.  The refugees’ extended families can join them, if the house is big enough.

 I recommend we start with people who oppose Trump’s immigration orders.  Why not?  How can they refuse to help?

 Joe Doakes

Reinforcing consequences for actions?

What’ll happen next?