Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hillary has $13 million worth of ads running during the Olympics.  Trump has none.

Meanwhile, viewership of the Olympics is down.  Hilary is burning off dollars running ads nobody is watching. 

 And people say Trump is the idiot?

 Joe Doakes

On the one hand – true.

On the other hand, I’m not sure anything Hillary does or doesn’t do will interfere with the rush to coronation that has our rulling class so bedazzled right now.

Mary Shapiro is running for the MN House in District 48A.  Here’s how you can help.

And, of course, ♫ today’s music playlist.

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

I’l be on from 1-3PM this afternoon.  Today on the show:

• Primary night!
• The war for the culture, the language, and the future.

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!

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is driving down a rural two-lane road near Rapid City, South Dakota. 

He notices a plume of smoke up ahead, so he steps on it to get closer.  Presently, he notices the burning car is a 12-year-old Subaru.  Standing by the side of the road, looking away from the car, is Avery LIBRELLE.  

BERG pulls over, pops his trunk, jumps out, and grabs a fire extinguisher.  He runs over to the car.  As he pulls the pin and points the extinguisher, LIBRELLE notices him. 

LIBRELLE:   Merg!   I’m driving among the red-state welfare queens!

BERG:   Avery, your car is burning! (Directs fire extinguisher towards engine compartment)

LIBRELLE:   Oh, yeah.  Don’t change the subject. Paul Krugman says that Red States get more money from taxpayers than they pay in…

BERG:   (distracted, as he extinguishes fire) Uh huh

LIBRELLE:   …while Blue states pay in more than they get back!

BERG:  (Coughing as cloud of smoky steam engulfs him, as the fire dies down).

LIBRELLE:   Red staters are welfare queens!

BERG:    (Finishing a bout of coughing).  Look, Avery.  See over there?  (BERG points over to Ellsworth Air Force Base).  See those planes over there?  Probably close to two dozen B1B bombers, which rolled off the dealer floor at $300,000,000 a piece and probably cost $30,000,000 a year apiece in fuel, maintenance, aircrew and ground crew salary, benefits and maintenance, not to mention the cost of the base itself in terms of people, supplies, and the cost of the very valuable farmland it and its associated training areas are built on?  Not to nThat’s tens of billions of dollars, just at this one red-state military base – which, divided among the sparse population.

Now – are you saying those planes, those personnel costs, all this physical infrastructure, is a transfer to the people of South Dakota?

LIBRELLE: (Idly stares at nearby prairie dogs).

BERG:  Then look over there (points at nearly Black Hills mountains).  That’s a huge national park.  Hundreds of thousands of acres, along with lots of other federal land.  Is that a transfer payment?

By the way – while there’s a ton of military spending and federal land, there’s a very tiny population with very low cost of living.  Blue staters pay lots of taxes because their cost of living, and income, are higher.  So – progressive taxation is suddenly bad?

LIBRELLE:   Yeah, you’re a racist, and why do you advocate killing Hillary Clinton?

BERG:  Naturally.

LIBRELLE:   Hey  (pointing at prairie dogs) – are they regstered to vote for their best interests?

BERG:  Not yet.  So – why did your car catch fire?

LIBRELLE:   Oh, yeah.  The oil light was on for like a month.

BERG:  Well, why didn’t you add oil?

LIBRELLE:   I didn’t want to enrich Big Oil.

(And SCENE)

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I blame Boko Haram.

You’d do well to read this entire article by Kevin Williamson – about the real source of human achievement.

Hint: its not politics, or politicians:

Politics thrives on convincing us that things are worse than they are, telling us that we must live in fear of violence and misery if we do not elevate the members of a very special caste of people who do very little resembling real work. The contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton is not only unworthy of us as Americans — it is unworthy of us as a species. We contain within us greatness and the seeds of greatness, and the belief that the affairs of this free, dynamic, prosperous, good, unprecedented republic of 319 million souls rests on the choice between Enfeebled Psychotic Miscreant A and Enfeebled Psychotic Miscreant B is a superstition, one that we should leave behind.

And the conclusion?

Even the best of them do not represent the best of us. They can do some good, mainly by protecting property and the freedom to trade, organizing the occasional public good here and there, while otherwise staying out of the way. We — we human beings — cut global poverty in half in 30 years, built an ever-expanding electronic Library of Alexandria and have connected (so far) about half of the world’s population to it, all but eradicated polio, and saw the average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa grow by 70 percent in 50 years. What’s next?

You could do worse than to read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I didn’t need the revised economic numbers to tell me the economy was bad, I see it driving around town.  Time was, you might see a panhandler at the top of a particularly busy freeway exit ramp.  Nowadays, there are several working shifts plus more at stop lights in town. 

 I wonder why there are so few stories in the mainstream media analyzing the Obama Administration policies that have created so many beggars, versus so many sob stories trying to shame me into giving more charitably.  It’s not working; the more they hector me, the more I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge: “Is there no welfare, no homeless shelter?”

 Joe Doakes

The term “compassion fatigue” is becoming old and shopworn – but it hasn’t lost its meaning.

Earlier this week: Donald Trump urges Second Amendment supporters to stand up for their rights to the political process. Mainstream media and the left (pardon the redundancy) craps a kitten at the “call for violence” which was not.
Democrat

Earlier this week: Donald Trump urges Second Amendment supporters to stand up for their rights to the political process. Mainstream media and the left (pardon the redundancy) craps a kitten at the “call for violence” which was not.

Democrat strategist calls for assassination of whistleblower. 

Wait – do you think there’s a conclusion to this?

We’ve written at some depth in the past about Minnesota Gun Rights – an astroturf fundraising group that raises a lot of money and generates a lot of strident social media about 2nd Amendment politics in Minnesota, but has never actually delivered any significant results.   A bipartisan selection of Minnesota’s most committed pro-human-rights legislators repudiated MGR a few years back.

In 2014, they dropped a few boxes of literature in the Roz Peterson race in Burnsville – and claimed credit for the victory.  This, and a couple of misplaced ads on AM1130, were their total effort that cycle.

In this primary cycle, they sent a lot of email to the Hackbarth/Bahr race, and also direct-mailed GOP activists in the Daudt/Duff race.

Well, guess what?

MGR is claiming credit for Cal Bahr’s victory over Hackbarth in HD31B – as seen in the social-media meme that’s been circulating all day today

Near as I’ve been able to find from my sources on the subject, MGR’s entire “campaign” in the Bahr/Hackbarth contest was email.

But let’s break it down:  Tom Hackbarth had:

• become not especially popular in his district anymore
• lost the endorsement of a district with a very well-organized party unit.
• not lost the endorsement of either of Minnesota’s legitimate human rights groups (GOCRA and MNGOPAC/MNGOC), due to his flawless human rights voting record – but then, Bahr looks very strong on the issue, too, and both groups noted it).

So sure.  Of course a couple of emails from MGR did the trick.

Of course, MGR expended even more effort in the Daudt/Duff race next door in 31A, apparently even sending paper mail – a sign of real commitment.

And the results?  Daudt stomped Duff.

Rob Doar of MNGOPAC/MNGOC said in social media “[MGR] swung much… much harder at Daudt, who won with over 72% of the vote…If they had any sort of political power, it surely would have manifested next door in 31A.  They are riding coattails, spinning stories…”

Friends don’t let friends repeat MGR claims.

Technology has wrought many wonders.

But this might be too much of a good thing:

BBC filmmaker Ted Harrison has claimed that it could just be a few short years before developments mean that they can create the feeling of human touch…the technology could be developed that would leave the door open to fans imitating sexual contact with their idols.

Which, in a world where pornography eats up about a seventh of the internet’s capacity, the idea that people will eventually use technology to simulate the wango tango is a dog sniffs dog story.  Duh; of course they will.

Perhaps it’s a sign that I do too much political blogging that the first thought that crossed my mind with this story was this question:  given the fanatic loyalty liberals have for their politicians, if this technology had been available over this past year, how often would Hillary (and Bill) Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been the subject of, um, transactions?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 1994, when Bill Clinton was President, there was another flare-up in the long-standing war between two African tribes – the Hutu and the Tutsis – fought mainly in Rwanda over the issue of political control to give special privileges to the dominant tribe’s members.  The losers fled to The Congo and continued the fight.  Nearly 5 million people have died and inter-tribal killing continues.

 In the United States today, Black people want special privileges.  They’ve been able to shame White people into going along because some White people were guilty of slavery so all White people should pay for it.  Hispanics are less sympathetic and Asians outright hostile because neither of those groups feels racial historical guilt over offenses committed 100 years before they arrived in this country.

 Black Lives Matter has upped the ante.  They called for dead cops and are starting to get them.  Black Lives Matter does not seek progress, it seeks regress.  It seeks to return Western Civilization to the level of Africal Tribal Warfare.

 Hispanics, Asians and Whites get lumped together as “White” for purposes of crime reporting and affirmative action.  As a “tribe,” Whites together with Hispanics and Asians, are 85% of the population.  We’re more numerous, more prosperous and better armed than Blacks.  If Black Lives Matter starts a race war, it’s going to be a damned short one.  But then, if Black Lives Matter had the ability to look at the big picture and take the long view, they wouldn’t be trying to start a race war at all.

 Joe Doakes

Y’know, it’s not something I care to discuss, since no rational person on “either side” is remotely interested in things turning out that way.

But I think the talk of militants – especially militants whose target is society at large – is wishful to the point of comical.

Truth!

Among the best ways for me to file your “argument” under “not worth the effort” is to begin with something like “your silence about [pick an issue that is not actually the subject of the current discussion] speaks volumes”, delivered with a rhetorical and literal “shame finger”.

I mean, I do appreciate the vote of confidence – your apparent belief that my addressing an issue on my show or blog will have some sort of affect on that issue over time, and that my “silence” – generally less “silence” than “lack of opportunity, interest, or any angle on which I have anything to contribute to the discussion” will cause the world such damage.

I assure you, it will not, but thanks for thinking I’m such a big cheese.

I’m not much of a conspiracy-theory-monger.   The most direct answer to most things is the right answer.  Generally.

So I’ve always been inclined to take most stories about the Clinton Famiglia with a block of salt.   For example, when Vince Foster committed suicide with eight shots to the back of his head, I dismissed talk of “murder”. ¹  What’s the point?

But when Julian Assange – the official counter-official-culture hero of the left and libertarian right – suggests that the DNC knows something about the murder of Seth Rich, whom he claims was his informant on the DNC email hacking case?  Well…:

Julian Assange seems to suggests on Dutch television program Nieuwsuur that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks-exposed DNC emails and was murdered.

Tangential takeaway:  wouldn’t it be cool if American reporters asked questions of both parties like the Dutch anchor does.

Upshot:  Assange won’t be doing lunch in Georgetown any time soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

A company of 88 British paratroopers and Irish infantry, outnumbered six to one, hold out for two months without reinforcements…

And their near miraculous survival has been described as a latter day Rorke’s Drift, evocative of the 1879 siege in which 140 British soldiers held off a Zulu force of 3,000, later immortalised in the blockbuster film starring Michael Caine.
For 56 days in the autumn of 2006, the men at Musa Qala faced constant fire from fixed machine gun posts and mortars.
Hungry and frequently at the point of exhaustion, they were forced to somehow fend off 360-degree attacks from the Taliban, with little protection beyond a series of low mud walls.
They used up a quarter of all the British Army’s Afghan ammunition for that entire year.

…and are barred from talking about it for ten years.  

Yet while Rorke’s Drift has been immortalised in film and resulted in 11 Victoria Crosses, Musa Qala has been reduced to a controversial footnote in the history of the Afghan conflict.
It does not serve Whitehall well for details of such a poorly resourced mission to be revealed.
Steve Humphries, the award-winning producer who has painstakingly put the jigsaw of pieces together for broadcast a decade later, says: ‘It’s a shocking account of what was supposed to be a peaceful mission to help bring security and stability to the region.

The whole thing is worth a read – and I may see if the BBC streams it next week.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Social Security admits out-go will exceed income in four years and reserves will be exhausted in 2032 meaning the system will go bankrupt, according to this chart:

 

Congress could increase taxes or cut benefits to keep the system solvent but we all know that’s politically impossible.  Sarah Palin suggested Death Panels to kill off elderly ill but Democrats hated that idea (although if Democrats could stack the committee with IRS employees, they might be able to “investigate” Republican medical treatment candidates long enough until they die while Democrat candidates are whisked right through – the panel idea could become popular with Democrats again using that method).

 The obvious solution is a massive employee die-off so we don’t have to pay Social Security.

 Fortunately, working in an office increases your chance of an early death.  Sitting is as bad as smoking.  So office workers will start dying just about the time the system runs out of money, meaning all is proceeding according to plan if we don’t let the Health and Wellness Nazis screw it up

 Joe Doakes

Not sure who to root for.

…and while 30-40% of the votes are in around the state, zero percent are reporting in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

That’s because, with the DFL machine fighting with progressive insurgents in the Kahn, Champion, Moran and other races, neither side wants to be the first to dump their fraudulent, bogus votes out there first and give the opponent a chance to top them.

It’s the Twin Cities way.

UPDATE:  Phyllis Kahn and Joe Mullery are out.  Minneapolis has now transitioned from Peronist to full-on Maoist.

Of course he did.

In most ofd the the United States, a “Public Hearing” is something that some variety of official body has to get, y’know, opinion from the public.

In Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and any place under the jurisdiction of the Met Council, “Public Meetings” are the equivalent of “DMV Eye Tests”; they are a ticket-punching formality that some government bureaucracy’s form says you have to do before you get the goodies you want from the taxpayer.

In the Metro Area, it’s included a vast swathe of “public hearings” on a wide range of issues where the public may or may not have been bitterly opposed, for mildly in favor for whatever reason – but are utterly irrelevant, because the various levels of government have already made up their minds; subjects like:

• The Blue Line
• The Green Line
• Target Center
• Target Field
• TCF Stadium
• USBank Stadium (AKA “Darth Vader’s Lake Cabin”)
• The “Minnesota United” soccer stadium
• The bike lanes down Jefferson and Charles in Saint Paul, and 42nd Street in Minneapolis.
• Best Buy’s corporate headquarters

And, latest but far from least, Saint Paul’s proposed sick time ordinance:

At a mayoral breakfast on Jan. 26, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman announced that efforts to craft a paid sick leave mandate in Minnesota’s capital city would roll out with input from the business community.

Dozens of pages of internal emails from the mayor’s office and other City Hall officials dating back to a year ago suggest just the opposite.

By the time Coleman made his first public statements on earned sick time, his office had already completed a 12-page draft ordinance three weeks beforehand.

On Jan. 7, the mayor’s policy director Nancy Homans circulated the draft proposal in an email to City Council President Russ Stark and other likely sponsors of the controversial mandate that drew stiff opposition from business leaders.

Libby Kantner, legislative aide to St. Paul City Council Member Chris Tolbert, shared an earlier version of the draft ordinance with Stark and other City Hall contacts on Dec. 23.

They’ll do your thinking for you, peasant.

GOCRA has released its primary scorecard.

If you live in a district with a primary, be aware of your options.

Also – please note that Michelle MacDonald – who ran with a GOP endorsement obtained through the perfidy of the party’s Judicial Elections Committee – is running again, without any endorsement.  She is being promoted by a number of people as the only pro-2nd Amendment, pro-life candidate on the ballot.

This would seem to be true.  So while I would be conflicted about endorsing her for office, if those two issues matter to you, it might be worth a protest vote against an Alita Messinger Mark Dayton appointee.  It’s your call.

American teen wins the first Gold medal in the Olympics.

Liberals – who apparently wished she’d won a gold for post-structuralist analysis – crap their pants with rage.

The sun rises in the east yet another day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration has been illegally maintaining a list of gun owners.

 This is my shocked face.

 Joe Doakes

How can you tell when a liberal policymaker is lying about “not coming for your guns?”

His lips are moving, or his fingers are near a keyboard.

My district – House 65A – features a primary between two DFLers; incumbent Rena Moran and challenger Rashad Turner, who’s earned a reputation this past year as one of Black Lives Matter’s more militant organizers.  (And for those who want to get out of the fever swamp, it also features endorsed GOP candidate Monique Giordana!)

Over the weekend, this flyer started turning up on Saint Paul social media:

First things first: I’m not positive it’s legit.  On the one hand, something smells funny about the flyer.

On the other hand, it is totally in character for the Saint Paul DFL, funny aroma and all.

I’ve run by far the most, er, liberal comment policy among Minnesota bloggers with traffic in my general weight class ever since I started carrying comments in 2002.

I ask for civility, as a general rule – but don’t require it, or at least not to a pollyanna-ish extent.  Don’t get too pointlessly inflammatory, and don’t go too far off topic, and we’ll get along just fine.

Unlike many blogs in my general traffic class, I don’t censor comments, and I don’t block commenters that I find annoying, to say nothing of those that try to challenge me.

I welcome commenters who disagree with me – indeed, encourage them. In the history of this blog, I think I’ve actually banned a grand total of half a dozen commenters – none of them for disagreeing with me, or even being jerks about it.

However, the comment section has a goal; to serve as a forum for discussion.  Which is to say, discussion of the topics I write about.

By extension, this means two things:

• By discussion, I mean a two-way dialog.  Not repeatedly, constantly, very deliberately, dropping comments and running away without any further discussion, as if my comment section is your personal blog space.  It’s not.  You want a place to drop your comments without further comment?  Get your own blog, and build your own audience.
• By the topics I write about, I mean “in relation to the posts I’m writing about”.   Now, I don’t mind the occasional thread-jack; sometimes they lead me to a topic I’d have missed otherwise.  But some thread-jacks just say “I don’t want to talk about what you’re writing about; I want to talk about what I want to talk about”.  Which is your prerogative – on your own blog.   Go out to Blogger.com or Tumblr or WordPress and start building your own audience.  It’s harder than it looks.

So I’m changing policies;  the following behavior will wind up with the commenter getting put in the moderation queue:

• Commenters who make a habit of leaving comments without discussing them, ever
• Repeated thread-jacking with an intent to turn the comment section into the commenter’s publication space.

When posts go in the moderation queue, they stay there until the offender contacts me to work things out.

I’m sorry it’s come to this.

A longtime reader of this blog writes regarding this post, by Joe Doakes:

To correct the record, Pillsbury United Communities is a nonprofit that is not connected to the Pillsbury brand owned by General Mills. It was founded by the Pillsbury family in 1905: https://www.puc-mn.org/about/history

It’s more analogous to the Ford Foundation vs Ford Motor Company.

This was apparently in response to Joe’s remark “Pillsbury Doughboy wants to give me a free assault rifle.  How can I turn that down?”.  

It would be more accurate to say “A bunch of left-leaning plutocrats want to provide us an opportunity to out-bid the city and themselves on some potentially useful hardware”.

We apologize for the error.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

First Quarter GDP revised down to 0.8% and second quarter revised down to 1.2%.  The economy is flat.

 And that’s if you believe these revised numbers are accurate information instead of political propaganda for the election year.

 Joe Doakes

Like any of Obama’s policy declarations, job and GDP numbers have shelf lives.