Mitch BERG is walking through a pet food store.  He rounds a corner and runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is plastering “Simulated Meat Is Murder!” stickers on bags of dog food.   Although BERG tries to evade, LIBRELLE sees him.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Aaaagh.  Er…hi, Avery.

LIBRELLE:  It’s time to institute universal background checks, ban clips that shoot thirty assault bullets a second, and get rid of assault AR47s.

BERG:  Two of those things don’t exist, and one of them will have no effect on crime but burden the law-abiding citizen exclusively.

LIBRELLE:  But if we save just one life, it’ll be worth it.

BERG:  So saving “just one life”, no matter how improbably, should be the basis for policy?

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  Human life is sacred.

BERG:  So then we should shut down the Green and Blue lines – about ten dead?  Or perhaps get rid of Obamacare?  Or for that matter, shutting down Planned Parenthood?

LIBRELLE:  Nooooo!  Some things are more important than human life!

(LIBRELLE puts bags of dog food around ears, runs from the store)

(And SCENE)

The Salvation Army is in the midst of their annual holiday fundraising drive.

Brad Carlson, my NARN co-host, and I have our own virtual Salvation Army “bucket” this year.  It’s right here.  For a lot of reasons, I’m a huge SA supporter.  I’m going to be pitching in, and I hope you will doo.

A Brief Bit Of Background:  Whenever I sit down in a large room with a bunch of co-workers to “meet” a new manager, and that manangers starts their presentation with “I’m a ‘process person'”, I tell my co-workers “Well, time to get our resumes polished up.  This department is screwed blue”.

And I’ve never been wrong.

Another Bit Of Personal Background:  Whenever I decry some miscarriage of justice, and some twerp – often a liberal, Ivy-League law-school grad – smugly intones “the process was met!”, I’m kept from strangling Ivyleaguer with his own intestines only with great difficulty, and sometimes only by other people.

Paging Petty Tyrants: There’s an old cliche; “state and local goverment are the laboratories of Democracy”.  Perhaps it’s true – but Pageville, Missouri is conducting an experiment in democracy’s extinction.

Faced with a court ruling that capped how much the city could earn in traffic fines, they decided to add fines for…

…well, pretty much everything, according to George Will:

Pagedale residents are subject to fines if they walk on the left side of a crosswalk; if they have a hedge more than three feet high, a weed more than seven inches high, or any dead vegetation on their property; or if they park a car at night more than 500 feet from a street lamp or other source of illumination; or if windows facing a street do not have drapes or blinds that are “neatly hung, in a presentable appearance, properly maintained and in a state of good repair”; or if their houses have unpainted foundations or chipped or aging layers of paint (even on gutters); or if there are cracks in their driveways; or if on a national holiday — the only time a barbeque may be conducted in a front yard — more than two people are gathered at the grill or there are alcoholic beverages visible within 150 feet of the grill.

Upshot; it’s pretty much impossible not to violate some sort of law or another in Pageville, MO.

But the city’s pecuniary interest in particular judicial outcomes, which creates an appearance of bias, is not the crux of the argument that the city is violating the 14th Amendment guarantee that Americans shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law.” The entire nation should hope that this small city’s pettiness will be stopped by a court that says this: The Due Process Clause, properly construed, prohibits arbitrary government action, particularly that which unjustifiably restricts individuals’ liberties.

That is, the Due Process Clause is not purely about process.

And if this case were a step toward enshrining, Heller-like, the idea that government isn’t about sanctifying process, but upholding the freedom of the citizen, it would be a huge start.

Because the sooner the idea that government exists to protect process is rhetorically loaded into a train and sent to a camp in Idaho to smash metaphorical rocks for a few decades, the better this country will be.

A couple weeks ago, we noted that retiring representative Kim Norton who has pledged to carry a clot of gun-grabbing bills through the legislature this next session, has  asked for “a conversation about guns” on social media.

And then blocked everyone that disagreed with her, instantly and comprehensively (as have with all other Minnesota gun grab activists).

I asked her to appear on the NARN; she begged off, claiming to have not really thought about the issue all that hard (notwithstanding the fact that her proposals in various mainstream and social media have been pretty detailed).

Well, l’ll keep on trying.

But until then, we’ve got a hint as to her sympathies, via Twitter:

Rep. Norton: celebrating passive victimhood for way too long.

I have a hunch she’s going to book a week in Costa Rica during “Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day” (MN-GOLD).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another poor yute, raised in grinding poverty on the mean streets of Eagan, a barren desert laid waste by climate change, turning to terrorism as a desperate cry for help.

Joe Doakes

If it saves just one life…

On Friday, we talked about comparing the US murder rate to the rest of the world.

Monday, the subject was what’d happen if we excluded America’s top forty highest-crime cities from the average.

Yesterday, we talked about what’d happen if we left the Old South, with its centuries of relatively violent Scots-Irish heritage, out of the nation’s murder rate.

In every case, the results were big.

Now, let’s go bigger.

The Math:  Here’s what it comes down to.

If you take the US’s 319 million people and 12,000-odd homicides (about 8,000 of which involve guns), and subtract:

• murders in the states of the Old South, the former Confederate and Border states (with population and murders from from Southern cities among “Top Fifty” cities’ overlapping murder rates removed, since they’re counted in the next bullet, and we wouldn’t want to deduct them twice)
• murders in the fifty US cities with the highest murder rates

And what does that leave?

Peace And Tranquility:  Incredibly, of the roughly 12,000 murders in the US in 2014, around 8,700 took place in either the Top Fifty crime cities, or the former slave states.

That’s 71% of the homicides for the entire US.

In other words, just a little over a quarter of all murders in the US happen outside the Old South and the fifty cities  and the slightly over a third of the population, with the highest murder rates.

The homicide rate for rest of the US – including many of its largest cities, and all of its urban and suburban areas outside Dixie –  falls to…1.8 per 100,000.   That’s the same as Israel – and it’s tied for #163 in the world.  It’s about 20% lower than Norway’s murder rate.   It’s not a lot higher, statistically, than Belgium, Canada, or Finland.

It’s about the same as North Dakota’s was, before the oil boom. Or Vermont today.

Or, as a matter of fact, almost identical to that of…

…wait for it…

…no, wait for it…

Peaceful, placid, passive-aggressive Minnesota.  North Minneapolis included.

And firearm crimes are more like 1.1-1.2/100,000.  Not “vanishingly low”, but pretty low.   About the same a Croatia, Macedonia, or Israel.

So…What?:  One of the Second Amendment movement’s oldest, most successful aphorisms is “guns don’t kill people; people do”.

And people do evil, or stupid, things for as many reasons as there are people.

But there are some overarching patterns that drive violence in the US; a violence-prone urban culture, with its gangs and black-marketeering and deeply dysfunctional justice system, and a deep south with a tolerance for petty and major violence that far exceeds the rest of the country.

And with those controlled for, the level of violence in the US, by world standards, is to say the least, low.

• Last Friday: Intro
• Monday:  The effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Yesterday:  The murder rate in the Deep South.
• Today:  What the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.

Read the rest of this entry »

A friend sends this passage from Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, on KSTP news last night:

Today’s crime tips from Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman:

“If you’re going to rob or burglered (sic) you know, the burgluring you can do in an unoccupied home and take the stuff and get out of there. If you’re going to rob a person you knock them down, take their money, and go. You don’t kill them.” – KSTP News at 6:30

i’m sure that will help.

“Gun Safety” activists who are trying to appear reasonable will claim that they support “Common Sense” reforms to gun laws.

One of their common fallbacks is “universal background checks” – in other words, running a background check for every single transfer of a gun, whether sold at Cabela’s, or handed down from Grandpa to grandchild, or a friend lending a friend a rifle for a hunting trip.

Of course, these background checks – which add $50-100 to the cost of every firearm sold, further driving them out of the reach of poor people – have been the law of the land in California for years.  And from the investigation into the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, we see how well they work:

On Thursday, one of the federal government sources told The Times that Farook asked his friend and neighbor, Enrique Marquez, to buy two military-style rifles used in the attacksbecause he feared he “wouldn’t pass a background check” if he attempted to acquire the weapons on his own. The rifles were bought at a local gun store, the source said.

So – we’ve got a “Straw Purchase” – a legal buyer making a purchase in the stead of an illegal one, which is illegal under federal law – followed by…:

There was no paperwork transferring ownership of the assault rifles from Marquez to Farook, as required by California law, government officials told The Times.

But wait!  They broke the law, even though it requires a background check for private transfers!

Surely there must be some mistake!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about the erosion of civil liberty in the UK:

And yet, if the homeowner had shot them breaking in, the homeowner would be the one in trouble.

They know the real problem.

Just like Barack Obama and Kim Norton do.

Friday, we noted that gun grabbers try their darnedest to keep discussions of murder rates to “western, industrialized” countries – because of course brown people in the third world only matter if you can get them to vote Democrat.

And yesterday, we discussed both the murder rate in America’s 50 cities with the highest murder rates, and how subtracting their population and murders from the US rates drops the US overall murder rate by over a quarter.

Still Smelling The Gunpowder:  But cities don’t have a monopoly on criminal pathologies.  But they share some reasons.

In the immediate wake of the 2008 elections, a wave of pundits and scholars, including the U of M’s Eric Ostermeier, noted a factoid; states that voted for John McCain had higher crime rates than states that voted for Obama.

In response, I pointed out a couple of things:

• state by state comparisons were meaningless, since the real breaking point in crime numbers occurs when comparing urban, suburban and rural counties
• If you left out the McCain states that were members of the Confederacy, McCain’s states had extremely low murder and violent crime rates.

Let’s look a little further.

Of Trash And Accent:  The states that became the Confederacy were most notably marked by the presence of slavery – and African-America still suffers from some of the aftereffects of slavery and post-slavery discrimination – but there was more to it than that.

The Old South brought with it some of the worst features of the post-feudal European society that it sprang from – including a fairly rigid class structure.  At the top were the aristocratic, largely British plantationers.  At the bottom, of course, were the slaves

Not far up from the slaves were the masses of what in Europe would have been called peasants; white, largely Scots-Irish people, mostly poor, many of whom came to the US under indentured conditions not much better than slavery.  They lived, until well after the Civil War, under a caste system that didn’t stress upward mobility, or any of the things – education, civil behavior and the like – that led to it.  That, combined with the Scots-Irish heritage of a level of tolerance for violence far above and beyond that of most European transplants, with honor killings, duels, violent family feuds and other shenanigans a part of the background until fairly recently, helped lead to an ambient level of violence far higher than the rest of what became the US, even before there was a US.

You want it spelled out in more detail?  See a sociologist specializing in southern Scots-Irish culture.

What it boils doen to is that even today, in the states that made up the Confederacy (I included the former “Border States” of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland, by the way – they weren’t in the Confederacy, but they kept slaves and had plantation systems, which is what led to the sociological pathologies in the first place), the roughly 113 million residents have an overall murder rate of 5.8 per 100,000.  By themselves, the states of the old Confederacy alone had a murder rate of 6.1/100/000.

The Math:  So let’s leave the population, and murder rate, of the Old South out of the picture.  With their population and murders dropped out of the population, but still including the population and murders of every city outside the Old South, all of the Detroits and Newarks and Oaklands, the US’s murder rate drops to 2.99 per 100,000.  That’s a drop of a little over a quarter.

It’s a murder rate comparable with that in Taiwan, or Nepal.

So what happens when we leave America’s two greatest concentrations of violent pathology out of the nation’s murder rate?

We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

• Last Friday: Intro
• Yesterday:  The effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Today:  The murder rate in the Deep South.
• Tomorrow:  We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies..

Read the rest of this entry »

The “gun safety” movement’s latest bright idea is “No Fly, No Buy”; people on one of the various government no-fly/terrorist watch lists would be disqualified from buying guns.

Second Amendment human rights activists oppose the idea, to the deep confusion of anti-gunners, who just don’t understand why it’s a bad idea.

The answer?  It’s a bad idea because government can’t be trusted with lists of people built without due process.  Ever!

I’ve added emphasis:

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

You gotta break eggs to make an omelet.

The usual bobbleheaded suspects on the left were chattering that Justice Antonin Scalia said “racist” things during a case.

They were, as usual, wrong.  But then, it was Harry Reid.  It goes without saying.

Charles C.W. Cooke:

By pushing one of the parties to extend and deepen its arguments Scalia wasn’t revealing himself to be a “racist”; he was revealing that he understands his job. This, alas, is more than can be said for those who have called him names.

Ifwe are to have a functioning justice system, we cannot hold lawyers personally responsible for the unpleasant parts of their designated roles. When a defense attorney successfully demonstrates that the prosecution’s case is too weak for a conviction, he is not betraying a preference for murder or rape or grievous bodily harm, he is ensuring that his client gets a fair shake.

Read the whole thing.

Because when dealing with the chanting points of the silly, low-info left that is very much in the ascendant, forewarned is forearmed.

(LEFTIES:  “Forewarned is forearmed” is a figure of speech, not a threat.  Relax).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy sent me this proposal to fight Islamic terror with unconventional tactics.

What if we armed teachers and others but when the next terrorist attack happens and the terrorists are gunned down, rather than credit the armed citizens, the official narrative given to all media outlets is that Wonder-woman did it?

Why not? If it’s on every channel on TV and also on the internet, it must be true, right? So make her real. Launch a coordinated propaganda effort to show that we have real superheroes in this nation, with super powers and invisible aircraft, etc. Buy airtime for re-runs of the TV show on every channel. Tell the world that she dropped some bombs from super high up to kill the Bad Guys here . . . and she can do it to you over there, too. We aren’t even going to bother sending our Marines, this job doesn’t need real men, we let our women handle piss-ants like you.

Plant talking heads on talk-show panels to debate whether her invisible aircraft is truly invisible or merely stealth. The underlying, unspoken assumption is that obviously Wonder-woman exists and so does her plane, that’s a given, while emphasizing that Wonder-woman’s airplane is undetectable and the question is how. The administration refuses to confirm or deny, of course.

Take the show on the road. Warn the locals in Syria that Wonder-woman is up there in her invisible plane. Leaflet them ahead of time even, warn them the invisible plane will be overhead to kill all terrorists at 11:00. Then dump the bombs on a known target at 11:00. It wouldn’t be that hard to engineer some glider bombs to whisk in sub-sonic, no rockets or other noise.

Worked in WWII. She was a source of pride for us and danger to the enemy. No, maybe Hitler and his high level goons didn’t believe, but the little fish who make things work may have doubts and anything that works to undermine confidence in their side, weakens their support.

Later, we’ll work Captain America into the program.

Joe Doakes

To:  Councilman Dai Thao
From:  Mitch Berg, next year’s “unwelcome” person
Re:  Next project?

Councilman Thao:

In re your proposed resolution barring The Donald for making Muslims feel bad; it looks like you’ve got more work to do.

That is all.

Last Friday, we noted that to the US’s murder rate of 3.8 per 100,000 ranks 121st in the world overall.

Which, to “Gun Safety” advocates, is just wrong; they insist on constraining the comparison to only “western, industrialized” countries – as if the life of a human being in Honduras or South Africa is somehow worth less, or their murder is of less weight than someone from Highland Park.   And I noted that the reasons for the comparison are to make the US look as bad as possible, against small, socially-homogenous countries like Denmark and Norway and Japan.

But I noted that among larger, westernized nations with at least a passing notion of human rights and any kind of social diversity at all, the US still fares pretty well

But then, I thought – what if we factor out the parts of US society that have the major crime problems?  What happens then?

In The City:  First, I thought, we should take a look at America’s cities.

For whatever reason, cities have almost always had a disproportionate murder rate.

So why is that?

Well, that question is one that keeps scads of otherwise unemployable sociologists hard at work.   But it’s no secret that American cities are faced with three pathologies:

• A “War on Drugs” that creates a lucrative black market in which someone with no education can make a stupendous income – provided he or she is willing to defend that income by all means necessary. The estimates of how many murders occur due to the “drug war” vary, but range as high as half.
• An “urban culture” that glorifies violence.
• Decades of social service agencies using the inner cities as “warehouses for the poor”, for bureaucratic and political reasons.  And while there’s little direct causal link between poverty and crime, long-term grinding poverty certainly provides fertile soil for growing crime.

Also, of the top 50 cities in terms of homicide rate – accounting for 11.3% of the population of the US – all but a very vanishing few are Democrat-controlled.  This isn’t so much intended to politicize the issue as to point out that single-party-dominated governments are always less effective at carrying out government’s valid jobs, like law enforcement.

But the fact is, some American cities have downright third-world murder rates:  Saint Louis tops the list in 2014, with almost 50 homicides per 100,000.  Detroit clocks in at 43.5.   We have 25 cities with murder rates above 10/100,000 – triple the national average.

In fact, if you take the ten US cities with the highest murder rates -Saint Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, Baltmore, Newark, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Atlanta, Cincinnati – they add up to about 1% of the entire population of the US – but they account for a solid 10% of all homicides in America.

But let’s go bigger than that.

The fifty American cities with the highest murder rates – from Saint Louis down to Charlotte, NC (5.5/100,000) together accounted for approximately 4.426 murders in 2015 – about 3,000 of them likely with firearms.

The Math:  So when you take the top fifty US cities in terms of murder rate, with their 34,7521.052 people (11.3% of the population), and their approximately 4,530 homicides from the US’s population and total number of murders, and subtract them from the rest of the United states, you get about 284 million people, and a murder rate of just under 2.68 per 100.000 people.  That’s roughly equal to the murder rate in Hungary – it ranks the US at #145 worldwide.

It also means that about 11% of the entire US population commits about 38% of the murders.

But the problems of American urban society aren’t the only ones driving up the United States’ homicide rate.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at a problem that dates back to before there were cities, or a United States for that matter.

• Last Friday: Intro
• Today:  The effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Tomorrow:  We’ll look at the murder rate in the Deep South.
• Wednesday:  We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two DFL Senators – Bev Scalze and Barb Goodwin, both women and long-time critics of back-slappin’ boys-club-member-in-good-standing Tom Bakk – are retiring from the Senate:

…For Scalze and others, the problems go beyond the disappointment of passing a budget that looked much different after Bakk and Daudt emerged from days of private negotiations with a deal in hand. It’s how leadership handled the final days of session.

Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, said many budget bills were controlled unilaterally, with little input or outreach to herself and other members. She and Scalze declined to put a number on how many Senate Democrats are upset, saying only to “look at the votes.”

Enough Democrats voted against three of the state’s seven budget bills that they required GOP votes to pass. Seven Democrats voted ‘no’ on three or more.

Take the environment budget, which just 10 Democrats — and 25 Republicans — voted to pass. Scalze said the finished product contained a surprise law change she and other members couldn’t stomach: exempting copper and nickel mines on the Iron Range from the state’s solid waste regulations. Bakk and other Senate DFLers represent swaths of the Iron Range.

“(Bakk) gave up a lot of stuff that other members had worked real hard on while he was getting everything he wanted for the Iron Range,” Goodwin said. “That kind of naked power is really not appreciated.”

Nobody who’s seen Tom Bakk will ever use the term “naked power” casually again…

…but the point is – wow.  It’s like the Dems have a war on women or something.

With a nod to Jonah Goldberg:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another victim of The Death Train.

Joe Doakes

If we save even one life…

Yes, you can get Lutefisk.

And here’s the link to Andy Aplikowski – the endorsed, conservative candidate – running against Jim Abeler (Abelertruth.com) in SD35.

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! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show: Saint Paul repeals the First Amendment; my challenge to gun grabbing legislators; plus…:

• I’ll be talking with Todd Lewis of the Warrior Retreat
• Also, Andy Aplikowski, running in the GOP primary against Jim Abeler in SD35.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

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!

When you get into a discussion with “Gun Safety” advocates, they usually start by knowingly, solemnly intoning that the US has some variant of “the highest gun murder rate in the developed world”.

In response to which I always ask two questions:

• Why just “western, developed countries?”:  The United States’ murder rate is actually in the bottom 2/3 of the world; with 3.8 murders overall per 100,099 people, we rank #121 in terms of murders overall.   And isn’t murder, murder?  Isn’t the life of a Honduran, or a Venezuelan, or an Indian or Russian, worth exactly the life of an American?   Isn’t their murder just as grave an offense?
• Why just “firearms” murders?:  In the immortal words of Archie Bunker:
  
  Are we to believe that murders committed with guns are more heinous than other murders? That murders with knives, clubs, gasoline or bare hands are somehow of less weight than those using firearms? That’s utterly illogical.

The stated goal of comparing only “western, industrialized” countries, we’re told, would be to “compare apples to apples”.  The real goal is to try to cherrypick results.  Of course the US will have a higher murder rate than Denmark, Sweden or Belgium – all of them are small, socially and culturally homogenous countries.   And of course we’ll have a higher murder rate than, say, Japan – a larger nation, but with a socially homogenous population (that, incidentally, tolerates police powers that’d make the ACLU yak up it’s collective skull).

So the correct response is to really compare apples to apples:  large, socially-diverse societies with at least a pretense of individual rights (and it may be a thin pretense indeed).

There, the US and it’s 3.8/100,000 murder rate (about 2/3 of which are firearm murders) looks pretty good compared to other large, industralized, socially and culturally heterogenous nations and the frictions and stresses they lend to the situation:

• Argentina: 5.5
• Brazil: 25.2
• Russia: 9.0
• South Africa: 31.0
• India:  3.5 (and virtually no civilian gun ownership)

But I got to thinking:  What if we took the next step, and accounted for the effect of social and cultural diversity and history in the US murder rate?

What effect would that have?

We’ll tackle that next week:

• Monday:  We’ll look at the effect urban crime has on America’s murder rate.
• Tuesday:  We’ll look at the murder rate in the Deep South.
• Wednesday:  We’ll see what the US’ murder rate would be without its biggest social pathologies.

I’m not a big Donald Trump fan.

No.  Really .  Not.  A.  Fan.

But I’m reminded of Churchill’s statement about Stalin; he didn’t care for him, but if Satan were Hitler’s enemy, Churchill would at least do lunch with him.

And so the Saint Paul City Council might be responsible for me doing  lunch with The Donald, after they put their own special carve-out in the First Amendment:

The St. Paul City Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution that condemns presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and declares Trump unwelcome within the city limits….[Councilman Dai Thao] acknowledged on Thursday he had not yet touched base with fellow council members on the resolution. “We think it will pass,” he said. “St. Paul has always been welcoming to immigrants.”

But not, apparently, dissent in any form.

Dear Mr. Trump:  While I won’t be voting for you at caucuses, I beg of you; please, please, please come to Saint Paul (aka “Chicago on the Mississippi”).  Call these morons on their bluff.

It’d be the show of the century.

It’s another big win for urban liberal privilege.

Steven Colbert built a career playing a broad “Major Bloodnock”-style caricature of a conservative, designed to make liberals titter knowingly (if, usually, autonomically; Colbert may have been, if possible, even more an innovation of “duckspeak” than his benefactor, Jon Stewart.

Now that he’s gotta be himself and win and audience?

What’s that smell?  Yep – the stench of death.

Heh.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

What the world needs now, is tin pot mayors and local dept heads to flit off to Paris, to save the environment by telling everyone else to stop using fuel to flit about. And to agitate for more outdoor refrigerated hockey rinks so no child ever needs to know the tragedy of soft ice in a January thaw.

Idiots. Has all the class and sense of a local ordinance to condemn war in the holy land, or to admonish the Boko Harem kidnappers, or other sweeping consequential mouthings of liberal platitudes.

Check out the list of dept heads, bike czars, you name it. Anyone with a government expense account is getting in on this one. Exhibit director at the Science Museum? I suppose that makes them the anointed climate expert? What with having created from plaster of paris and scraps of cloth an exhibit that is every bit as scientifically sound as the so-called consensus evidence.

Also – look who’s paying for it. Some do-gooder group. Which is funded by tax dollars. Which are contributed by cities, run by the politicians who are getting a free vacation in Paris. Money-laundering their graft and pretending it’s noble effort to save the planet. They never hold these conferences in Darfur or Mogadishu.

joe doakes

If this were the private sector, the regulatory authorities would squat on it like a rhinoceros with diarrhea.

Someone in my social circle tried to compare Bernie Sanders with Ronald Reagan.

I thought about responding.

But let’s be honest.  Nobody says it better than Aretha: