They’re back.  In the wake of the shooting at the abortion mill in Colorado Springs, and the shooting in Minneapolis (and to a lesser extent last week’s shootings in San Bernardino, which the left tried its level best to jam into the template), the talking heads of the left are furrowing their brows and warning us, yet again, about the imminent danger of “white christian right-wing terror”, which, we’re warned, is a huge danger, and could become the biggest most dangerous terror out there.  Says someone in the government. Because science.

It’s BS, of course; while white “conservative” terror was a real thing during the heyday of the Klan, by the seventies it had largely faded to obscurity; today, the Klan and other white/”Christian” identity movements are a pimple on society’s tush.

Indeed, the numbers aren’t even arguable; left-wing environmental groups committed more terror attacks than all other sources combined from 2001-2011; while 9/11 outstripped them all in terms of dead people, the level of effort was lopsided in favor of the left.

And yet the left – from Janet Napolitano to MPR’s Bob Collins down to the dimmest writer at Minnesota Progressive Project, assures us that white terror is the real danger.  

David French points out the absurdity of the left’s claim, against a backdrop of steadily diminishing domestic terror of all kinds:

Don’t tell the alarmists that, though. Even before this weekend’s shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, left-wing sites trumpeted the threat of “Christian terrorists” while minimizing the threat of jihadists. This summer, the New York Times hyped a transparently idiotic study claiming that (mainly right-wing) homegrown extremists were deadlier than jihadists — by excluding from the death toll the almost 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 and the nearly 7,000 Americans killed — not to mention the more than 52,000 Americans wounded — at the hands of radical Islamists overseas. SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEETSince the Planned Parenthood shooting, leftists have indicted the pro-life movement itself for the actions of a bitter and angry loner with no known connections to any activist organization. The Huffington Post wrote a story noting that Colorado Springs is full of — gasp! — Christians. Buzzfeed published a comprehensive report demonstrating exactly how abortion-rights activists intend to turn the Colorado shooting into a “rallying cry.”

What it is, is Berg’s Seventh Law in full effect.

A long-time friend of this blog writes:

I do have sympathy for the BLM grievances, truly.  But their goals are very undefined, nebulous, etc.  It’s sad.  It is a tragedy about the young man killed by the police.  I don’t know the facts but it is still a tragedy for all who are involved.
I purposefully walked through the tunnel from the HennCo Govt Center to Mpls City Hall this morning.  There is no evidence of the large protest there yesterday.  The graffiti on Wings Financial was not in evidence.  The main lobby of City Hall did not look worse for wear.  I am pleased for the protesters not doing permanent damage to get their point across, that was very good of them.  The clean up crews also did a good job.

That same night [an acquaintance], a white, middle-aged woman left our building unaccompanied as usual.  The bulding is very near City Hall.  Some man leaving the protest walked up to her and started screaming “BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER!”  She is a very experienced urbanite and just ignored him but he followed her screaming some more.  She was not particularly frightened by the whole incident, felt a bit threatened and will be sure to pay attention to more  “protests” in order to plan her route to evade them.  The moral of this story is that all the BLM energy simply made a person who might be sympathetic to their cause into a person who sees them as complete idiots to be avoided.
The BLM group though reminds me of the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”  I mean they go to protest at Elsie’s in NE Mpls (a fine place) because they heard a “police” function was happening there.  But lo and behold it was a holiday fundraiser for HennCo Sheriff Stanek (I had an invite but was unable to attend).  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Plus the even was over by the time they got there.  Wrong event, wrong time.  This is BLM’s problem.  They have some legitimate gripes.  They have a totally ineffective response.

And here’s the real radical idea (emphasis added):

Maybe they should do something REALLY radical and start showing up, putting forth candidates, and finding support at the REPUBLICAN caucuses!  Guaranteed, they will very quickly find real meaningful results coming their way.  Either the Dems will get so scared, they will actually start doing something or they will find a very welcoming group at the GOP who will also be falling over backwards to assist.
Just a thought.

That would, of course, shake things up.  A lot.

Of course, it won’t be BLM pushing that.  Black Lives matter is funded by liberals with deep pockets, almost entirely with a goal of trying to keep the African American vote jazzed up during a Democrat campaign season where the black voter will be asked to choose among a bunch of geriatric white people.

Qua BLM, it may not be working – but then that’s not the point.

Lately, the academic left has been hotly engaged in an Orwellian airbrushing of history – trying to cut the legs out from under great figures in history, based on a modern reading of their deeds, beliefs, ethics and morality.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln was a racist first _{and a bunch of other stuff way, way down the list}  

…provided they’re white and American, naturally; Gandhi’s racism and anti-semitism and Che Guevara’s sexism, racism and homophobia don’t rise to the level of retroactionable.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course; I remember having this argument with the PC warriors nearly thirty years ago; “I’d be interesting to see how people 100 years from how judge us”, I’d howl into the void.

Victor Davis Hanson says it better, naturally.  Here’s the conclusion…:

On campus, violations of the Bill of Rights, obsessions with race rather than character, inflated and puerile self-regard, adolescent self-indulgence and materialism, along with epidemic factual ignorance, inability to speak and write coherently, and the loss of inductive reasoning may ensure that the early 21st century will be judged as an era of anti-Enlightenment ignorance — with the twist that never have such pampered people so little deserved all that they inherited.

…but read the whole thing anyway.

Kevin Williamson on the Democrats’ contempt for the rule of law, to say nothing of the First and Second Amendment:

If the Democrats want to do away with the Second Amendment, let them begin the amendment process and see how far they get. We should challenge them to do so at every opportunity.

In reality, the Democrats have declared war on the First Amendment, voting in the Senate to repeal it; they have declared war on the Second Amendment at every turn; they also have declared war on due process and, in doing so, on the idea of the rule of law itself, beginning with the notion of “innocent until proven guilty.” That isn’t liberalism — it’s totalitarianism.

That’s a winnable fight, and we should welcome it.

I’m just going to shut up and urge you to read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Then:

WORLD’S OIL WILL RUN OUT IN TEN YEARS The latest measurements confirm that the world’s oil and natural gas supplies are running out too fast. At some time between 2010 and 2020 the world’s supply of oil and gas will fall below the level required to meet international demand. The US government is aware that we are about to endure a disastrous international energy shortage. According to Dr James McKenzie, a senior member of the climate change programme at the World Resources Institute in Washington, USA: “That’s why we went to war in Iraq.”

Now:

 

“It is better to choke back than to sell into this market,” Henderson said.
“There is just too much gas,” said Kastner. “I expect to see a downturn for the next two years.”

Joe Doakes

And yet Paul Ehrlich isn’t earning a living scrubbing pans in an Olive Garden.

Thanks, all you “I F*****ng Love Science”-reading hamsters on the left!

I had not heard this story – of a group of 1,000-odd American POWs who, at the behest of a quick-thinking master sergeant, all called themselves Jewish to protect the Jewish GIs among them.

The master sergeant – Roddie Edmonds, of Knoxville, who passed away thirty years ago – is now the fifth American to be inducted into the “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:

At the time of Edmonds’s capture, the most infamous Nazi death camps were no longer fully operational, so Jewish American POWs were instead sent to slave labor camps where their chances of survival were low. US soldiers had been warned that Jewish fighters among them would be in danger if captured and were told to destroy dog tags or any other evidence identifying them as Jewish.

So when the German camp commander, speaking in English, ordered the Jews to identify themselves, Edmonds knew what was at stake.

Turning to the rest of the POWs, he said: “We are not doing that, we are all falling out,” recalled [MSGT Edmonds’ son] Chris Edmonds, who is currently in Israel participating in a seminar for Christian leaders at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.

With all the camp’s inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: “They cannot all be Jews.” To which Edmonds replied: “We are all Jews here.”

Then the Nazi officer pressed his pistol to Edmonds head and offered him one last chance. Edmonds merely gave him his name, rank and serial number as required by the Geneva Conventions.

“And then my dad said: ‘If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,’” recalled Chris Edmonds, who estimates his father’s actions saved the lives of more than 200 Jewish-American soldiers.

Edmonds survived – although by the end of the war, with the food shortages in Germany, life in POW camps was better than concentration camps only by dint of the assurance that the Germans weren’t supposed to kill the inmates.

From Bob Collins’ “Newscut” blog at MPR, in a story about the congressional donnybrook over extending healthcare benefits to first responders and construction workers from Ground Zero:

With that brick, Jon Stewart showed again last night why his retirement has created such a vacuum of moral authority in the national dialogue.

Doesn’t that tell us so much about why this country is in the state it’s in?

One side gets (and, with deep imperfections, practices) its “moral authority” from a long train of the best of human thought, tracing back from Friedman and Hayek and John Paul II, back through the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man, all the way back to the Ten Commandments.

The other?  From standup comic on a TV show conceived as the “progressive” establishment’s answer to conservative talk radio hegemony, featuring a talented standup comic with a gift for snarky faces.

Jonah Goldberg:

I caught some of Morning Joe from my hotel room before I left for the airport. The caption for one discussion was “Were They Radicalized?” I keep seeing stories asking this question as if it’s some great mystery we may never get to the bottom of. The media and the Democratic party are working very, very, hard to pound the wet clay of San Bernardino into a story about runaway gun violence in America.

Just curious: What discrete piece of info are we waiting for to get a definitive answer to that question? Because I thought it might be the thousands of rounds of ammo, the remote-control-car-bombs, the decision to abandon their six-month-old daughter, the contacts with terror suspects and, oh yeah, the murder of 14 people. But hey, that’s just me.

I used to think PJ O’Rourke was being hyperbolic when he said J-school students were the ones too dumb to get into Education.

Muggeridge’s Law is in full effect, obviously.

Still, amid the japing about our dimbulb journalistic “elite”, there’s a serious issue.  The people are being actively disinformed:

Right now the media and the Democratic party are working very, very, hard to pound the wet clay of San Bernardino into a story about runaway gun violence in America. Bogus stats about there being a mass shooting on average once a day streak across the media firmament like so much St. Elmo’s Fire. The fact that gun violence has been in a decades-long decline doesn’t count for much. Poor Charlie Cooke is running around like the last artillery officer on a 19th-century British warship, trying to return fire from each cannon station.

Cook is doing his usual great job.  But he’s far from alone on the, er, gun deck.

The World’s Most Elite Newspaper, Last Year:  “Terror watch lists are arbitrary, opaque, authoritarian and unconstitutional“.

The World’s Most Elite Newspaper, Today: “Except for people who want to buy guns”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This sounds like someone was trying for The Onion but can’t write well enough to make the cut.  Seriously, signing it “The Movement,” who writes like that?

Joe Doakes

Does anyone but me remember when Muggeridge’s Law seemed, ironically, funny?

In 1994, in a church parking lot off of Sixth and Arcade on the East Side of St. Paul, Guy Harvey Baker, a deranged Gulf War veteran, shot and killed a Saint Paul police officer – Ron Ryan Jr.

Baker then drove towards a woman, standing in the door of the nearby apartment building across the parking lot, to eliminate the only eyewitness.

A man in an apartment building across the street, Lyle Granlund, who happened to be an expert marksman – and had a loaded handgun at hand – considered shooting the murderer.  But then, he reconsidered – thinking that Tom Foley, the Ramsey County attorney and Wahhabi DFLer – would likely prosecute him with just as much zeal as he would the cop killer.

So instead, Granlund shot to mark the car – putting rounds through the back windshield, lodging them quite intentionally in the dashboard and glove box, saving a round in case Baker came after him next.  Baker took off, to be found later that day (via the broken back window), leading to a further shoot out that killed another St. Paul policeman, Officer Tim Jones, as well as his dog Laser.  Had Granlund not feared prosecution (quite legitimately – Foley did, in fact, try to prosecute him, and stopped only when the St. Paul police refused to cooperate), Baker would have ended his spree in that parking lot, with one dead, and Officer Jones would have lived to serve another day.

Political correctness killed a police officer.

And it’s tragic to see that we have learned absolutely nothing from the event. It’s entirely likely that 14 people are dead in San Bernardino because people fear politically correctness-induced repercussions is on the part of the authorities more than they do criminals.

A week ago this past Monday, we wrote about the tear-squirting in Kansas, as Kansas’ state-run post-secondary schools get ready for the legal mandate to allow concealed carry on campus to take effect.

And today comes the story of a student and victim from the mass-stabbing a few weeks ago at University of California at Merced, who, after a terrible experience that included being stabbed (and waiting 20 minutes for police to arrive)(…:

…After that horrifying experience of being stabbed, Price was able to drive himself a couple of miles from the university, to Mercy Medical Center, to be treated.

Amazingly, within a couple of hours, he was able to drive himself home.

“I’m not going to get upset over one loose cannon,” said Price.

Infact, he plans to head back to the university, to get back to work.

The contractor is just thankful, he’s able to go home to his family, still puzzled over why.

“To become a university student and throw it all away like that, I don’t know why he’d want to do that,” said Price.

…undertook the sensible conclusion:

Price says he now thinks differently about having a concealed weapon.

He wishes he had one when this all unfolded.

Police chiefs and politicians may hem and haw at the idea – but the people who actually live where this crap happens know better.  A guy with a gun saves lives.  Even if it’s just their own.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Seems to me I read a similar proposal on SITD lately.

Maybe you’re inspiring a national movement!!

Joe Doakes

I’m like the “Murray the K” of gun rights.

I was tempted to fisk the NYTimes’ deeply stupid editorial – their first front-page editorial since 1920 – calling for confiscation of “assault weapons”.

But Brian Doherty at Reason already did it, and did it better.

Read the rest of this entry »

The inhabitants of the sleepy Mesopotamian village of Kut al Amara (or Kut for short), might have felt like strangers in their own homes on December 7th, 1915.  Situated on the banks of the Tigris river 100 miles south of Baghdad, the 6,500 residents of Kut were certainly used to people passing through, albeit usually via the river.  But the latest visitors to Kut had mostly arrived by land – well over 13,000 of them – and were starting to make themselves at home.  Trenches and bulwarks were being created overnight; tents flooded the village and surrounding river banks.

The newest guests to Kut were a collection of British and Indian troops who had last passed through the village attempting to claim Baghdad, and all of Mesopotamia, for the Crown.  Now in headlong retreat, the British and Indians had chosen to dig in and allow themselves to be surrounded by their Ottoman pursuers.  It had been the the brainchild of an arrogant British Indian Army General who preferred taking his orders from New Delhi than London, and was being executed by a British General whose claim to fame had been enduring a similar siege in Pakistan years earlier.

The strategy to conquer Mesopotamia had been ill-conceived and hastily implemented.  Now it was about to become, in the words of one British military historian, “the most abject capitulation in Britain’s military history.”

—

The Siege of Kut – many of the troops that held Kut for 147 days would never return home

Had the War Office in London gotten their way, Britain’s involvement in the so-called “Cradle of Civilization” would have ended in November of 1914.    Read the rest of this entry »

So the next time some anti-gun talking head says “There’ve been 355 mass shootings so far this year”, remember – the figure comes from this site, “Shootingtracker.com“.  It’s a crowd-sourced site that allows pretty much anyone to report a “mass shooting” – defined as any event where three or more people (including the shooter) get shot.

Now, the media presents this as if every incident is a spree killing – someone setting out to kill innocent people at random (Columbine, Red Lake, the DC Navy Yard et al) or as acts of terrorism (San Bernardino, Chattanooga etc).

Of course, it includes many more mundane crimes; thugs shooting into crowded bars, family murder-suicides, and many, many criminal acts gone terribly awry.

And, it seems, one act in 2015 of whose genesis we’re not remotely sure.

Check out #345.  It was the shooting in North Minneapolis on November 23.

Now, you can find Mr. Scarsella’s motives repugnant – I certainly do, if they are as alleged.  And you can note, very correctly, that if Messrs Scarsella, Macey, Gustavsson and Backman wanted to claim self-defense, waiting for the Minneapolis Police to find them was the wrong way to do it.

But they do, in fact, seem to have at least a passing claim at self-defense, not something that can be dismissed out of hand no matter how much one may wish to.

So while it may be legitimate to count it as a “mass shooting” – a mass of three or more people were shot! – lumping it in there with San Bernardino, and the Navy Yard, and Umpqua, with their perps that fully intended to kill innocent people for purposes of either media immortality or political terror, is deeply dishonest – whether on “Shootingtracker.com”‘s part, or on the media’s.

It also introduces the question:  does it include other shootings, where a citizen interrupted a mass shooting with return fire?

I’ll be looking this over in coming days.

One of the downsides of being a GOP activist and officer is that you have to get involved, even passively, in GOP inside baseball.   Ever.  For any reason.

And of course, it’s important; without a viable challenge to the DFL, Minnesota is a few downturns away from turning into California.  Or Minneapolis.

So I go to the meetings.  I vote on stuff.  I do my bit to try to help get better people elected to office; not just Republicans, but conservative Republicans who support limited government.

And I try to get as informed as I can about some of the “inside baseball” issues in the GOP; the budget deficit (how the hell…?), the collapse in the Cities, the turnout issues in the first and second ring ‘burbs…

…and of course, the Judicial Elections Committee.

That Buzzing Sound That Never Goes Away:  The JEC is an obscure fixture in the MNGOP, focusing both on endorsing judicial candidates and fighting for judicial reform.

As re the second?  The subject is a deadly combination of intensely technical and very important.   It’s intensely picayune – and absolutely vital.  The judiciary has turned into an unaccountable, opaque, lifetime sinecure in Minnesota; judges have extremely disproportionate power as a result, and the ability to make sweeping decisions with almost no accountability.  And the power extends beyond just the courtroom; the past several state redistricting processes, including the 2010 redistricting – gerrymandered enough to make Bull Connor and George Wallace sit up in the grave and say “Hey, bucko, you’re getting a little carried away, here”.  “Shall Issue” carry reform was struck down in 2004 by a judge whose home was a DFL hamster wheel and who, ignoring the fact that every state budget is a combination of omnibus bills full of unrelated amendments, struck down the law because it wasn’t closely enough related to the bill that was originally amended.

So there is a problem that needs to be solved.

There’s a lot of history to the notion of judicial endorsements, and the creation of the JEC, and its activities since it was established; I’ve written about them in the past, and I won’t rewrite it all now (search my site for references to the phrase “My brain went blank and my ass went numb”).

But it’s the JEC’s recent history that concerns me most.

Last Saturday was the GOP’s State Central Committee meeting.  I didn’t attend – but the future of the JEC was one of the subjects up for discussion.  And my butt went a little numb just reading the accounts on Twitter.

Business:  Of course, the JEC’s main claim to “fame” was the endorsement of Michelle McDonald to run for State Supreme Court.  This happened at the MNGOP State Convention in Rochester in May of 2014.  McDonald turned out to have a pending year-old DUI charge – about which the convention was not told.   We’ve written about this at some length in the past.

Let’s fast forward to last Saturday.  A series of handouts was waiting for the SCC delegates as they arrived at the event, or distributed during the convention; a friend scanned and sent them to me (the scan is included below the jump).

In it, the JEC explains the reasons for its existence – and, to be honest, does it fairly well, in places (and let’s be honest – the handout was written by logorrheacs, and you have to dig to find the good stuff.  But it’s in there).  In all my years of listening to JEC members trying to explain why judicial endorsements, and judicial reform, are good and vital, and why retention elections are bad, this is the first time even the faintest hint of a light has gone off above my head.

And so partly as a result of this handout, my previous determination to tear down the JEC, with flamethrowers if necessary, has been tempered just a bit.

I said “the JEC”.

The JEC’s membership is another story.

Twenty Octogenarians Driving A Clown Car:  If you recall – and I completely forgive you if you do not – the history of and beef with the McDonald endorsement goes a little something like this:

1. The JEC recommended Michelle McDonald – a controversial family-law lawyer – for nomination to run for the Supreme Court (SCOM).
2. At the State Convention, after the delegates had endured a 20-odd-hour endorsement battle for Senate, the JEC brought McDonald to the stage for a speech and a motion for endorsement by acclamation.  Many delegates were out – grabbing a bite, or in the bathroom, or stretching their legs after the endless Senate battle – and many that were in the room reported feeling bum-rushed – but the motion for acclamation passed, and McDonald was endorsed.
3. The following week, the media reported that McDonald had a pending DUI charge awaiting trial.
4. Reports emerged that the JEC had been aware of this charge, but had voted to nominate McDonald anyway, and had voted to not inform the delegates, including blocking an attempt to issue a minority report to the convention that would have brought up the legal issues for the delegates’ consideration.
5. McDonald and the MNGOP brass spent the next five months fighting each other, under a blazing media spotlight, rarely managing or bothering to engage the DFL’s candidate, Darth Lillehaug, on any level.
6. McDonald went on to lose the election against Lillehaug.  According to some reports, her campaign raised less that $1,000, and spent about $8,000.

The handouts give a couple of insights into the JEC’s performance – or “performance” – at the 2014 State convention, in the first two pages (the pink ones, whose order is reversed; page 2 is actually page 1).   It’s also full of opinion-driven weasel words – “the chair appeared…”, “in the committee’s opinion, the chair…” and the like.

There are two quotes from the handout, though, that display…something about the JEC’s opinion of itself; whether that something is arrogance, incompetence or malfeasance, I’m not sure and I’ll leave it to better judges than I.

It should be noted that the purpose of any endorsing committee is to spare the convention the task of sorting through a candidate’s personal life.  the job of any endorsing committee is to do the work in confidence and present a yes or no to the convention.  Committees focus on a candidate’s message, their willingness to campaign hard and their ability appeal (sic) to voters.  The idea that the Judicial Election Committee (or any other nominating committee) should air a candidate’s personal information to the convention is badly misinformed.

Exactly what a nominating committee is supposed to do is a subject worthy of discussion. And the passage may be right; a nominating committee should concern itself with competence and electability.

But a legal proceeding that is guaranteed to provoke a media feeding frenzy is both not “personal information” – it’s a public record, available online from the courts – and of direct impact to the candidate’s electability.

So this quote – along with the rest of the information in the handout, brings up three possibilities:

1. The majority of the JEC genuinely believed that an arrest record is “personal information” that was nobody’s business.  If this was the case, then we’re dealing with some stupid people.  Arrest records are public!  Public!  Public!  Anyone who thought this was “personal information”, and believed that the media and DFL would treat it that way, needs to be publicly (rhetorically) horsewhipped.
2. They knew about the arrest record, but figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since McDonald assured them the charge was BS:   You’ll note how many media figured led with the whole “Michelle McDonald is innocent until proven guilty, and gosh, she looks like she has a strong case” tack, right?  Somewhere less than zero?  Part of a nominations commission’s job is to try, as far as possible, to prevent media poo-storms like…the one we had.
3. The JEC figured the news would be a problem, but wanted to jam McDonald down anyway, leading a supermajority to vote against the issuance of a minority report.   This is the worst kind of malfeasance.

We also see in another quote that the JEC is wallowing in either wishful thinking or an arrogant desire to bullshit the rest of the party:

…in spite of the flap over a now resolved (not guilty) DWI case, Michelle McDonald for Supreme Court won 46.54% of the vote.  This is higher than Johnson, McFadden, Severson, Gilbert and Newman – all the other MNGOP endorsed candidates

How stupid do these people think the rest of the party is?

The DWI is “now resolved” – but it wasn’t at election time.  And the media certainly didn’t harp on “innocence until proven guilty”.

As to her turnout?  As we pointed out the first time the JEC tried to use this chanting point to gull the gullible, it was BS.  McDonald got 46% against Lillehaug, it’s true – but John Hancock got 42% against Mimi Wright, and virtually every contested judicial race in the state got 35-40%.  McDonald outscored random, obstinate, uninformed noise by 4-6%. And while it’s possible she outperformed “background noise” due to her brilliant campaign, it’s also possible that a few thousand shooters voted against Darth Lillehaug, and would have no matter who was nominated.

My Conclusion, For Those Who Care?:  The JEC exists for good reason.  Minnesota’s judicial system needs changes, and the GOP needs to help drive those changes.

But most of its members need to go.  Decency would involve resignations of the sitting membership for their malfeasance, or at least stupidity, in the McDonald flap.   The JEC process is almost completely opaque to delegates, and even officers at the BPOU and Congressional District level.   I’m an officer, and I have no idea how Judicial Districts elect officers and do business.  It’s not just me.

The JEC, in my opinion, is a nook and cranny of the GOP that was built by, and is controlled by, a group of people who have turned it into their little political playground.  This doesn’t serve the mission that the JEC has set out for itself.

Just my opinion.  But I’m not alone.

As we’ll see, I’m sure, come the next State Convention.

Telling Tangent: Want to know something ironic?  I might well have voted for McDonald even with the pending DUI charge, had the JEC tried a little honesty, and had McDonald spent more time tackling Darth Lillehaug than Keith Downey.  But if I’d known about her involvement in the Grazzini-Rucki custody battle, I’d have voted for Charles Manson before I’d vote for McDonald.   If McDonald was involved with kidnapping and brainwashing a couple of kids against their custodial father, she deserves much worse than losing an election.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everything Republicans said about Obamacare has come true.  Now, even the cheerleaders realize it.

“We did not believe it would form this slowly, be this porous, or become this severe,” he added.

Translated: “porous” means “the Obamacare net caught only sick people because the healthy ones were allowed to wriggle out through various Executive Orders.”

Further translated: “Obama lied to us; he promised we could base premiums on a mix of young healthy people with old sick ones, then he threw us under the bus by letting the young healthy people out to save his re-election.”

Still further translated: “I believed Obama.  I was an idiot.”

Yep.  Republicans knew it six years ago.  Glad we could clear that up.

Joe Doakes

Being right is fun.

Being right after a good chunk of our economy and healthcare system has been botched like a Salvadoran tummy-tuck?  Not so fun.

We apparently don’t have Heather Martens to kick around anymore!

As carry permit applications, pre-purchase background checks, and gun and ammo sales roar to new all-time records, the NRA is being crushed with new and renewing members.

Scarcely a peep in the media (especially about the membership).

But one Democrat politician and “NRA member” “quits” – and the media is lined up out the door.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d wager good money that:

1. He was an “NRA member” for the same reason I “joined the teachers union” when I taught a semester at Metro State, and
2. Come his next campaign, he’s going to have at least one pic in his campaign lit, decked out in hunting camo with a duck gun.

But I won’t blame anyone for not taking any action on that bet.

How do you sign up for the Debate Party with Geno and the Count, with cigars and adult beverages, at the legendary Mancave?  Right here, baby!

Here’s the Legislative Evaluation Assembly.

And of course, ♫ today’s music playlist.

That figure that the media and the anti-gun chanting-point-bots are jabbering about – where there’ve ostensibly been 355 “mass shootings” so far this year?

Yeah, it’s BS.

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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, we’ll be talking – you guessed it – San Bernardino.  Also…:

• I’ll be talking with John Augustine of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly about the upcoming session.
• I’ll be talking with Geno and The Count about their upcoming debate night party.

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!

I can’t remember the band that was playing the first time I went to the First Avenue, in Minneapolis, when I first moved here in 1985 – although I have some fairly clear memories of my first impressions of the bar itself.    It was probably one of any number of punk bar bands that were vying to be “The Next Replacements” – not much unlike the band I’d be starting myself in future months.

But I do remember clearly the first concert I went to: October 15, 1986 – Richard Thompson.   It was on tour with this band…:

…and it was on my list of my top three concerts, ever.

I also remember the last concert I saw at the First Avenue (and the last club gig I attended at all, until I saw Katrina “and the Waves” Leskanich last spring at the Amsterdam); yep, it was Richard Thompson, in September of 1997.  There were two other gigs – ’88 and ’90 – in between.

And so when I got a late tip that Thompson was coming to town this past Wednesday, I had to check it out.

It was a chilly night in downtown Minneapolis – which, in my memory, was always what it felt like on concert nights in Minneapolis when I was in my 20s:

7th Street, Wednesday night.

The, er, disconcerting part?  The first time I saw Thompson, the average age in the audience was 25-40.  On Wednesday, it was more like 50-60…:

…although there were a gratifying share of twentysomethings in the house.   Upside?  While concerts with bands catering to twentysomethings routinely find themselves getting patted down or run through metal detectors, security was pretty irrelevant at the Thompson gig.

The opening act – Richard Thompson, doing a solo acoustic set – was predictably amazing.  And when I say “amazing”, it’s not just an idle conversational space-filler; I’m not a bad guitar player, but every time I see Thompson, I say that very quietly, and go home afterward and ponder starting over on the instrument from scatch, just to try to get it right.

How amazing?   I’m one of tens of thousands of guitarists who’ve tangled their fingers into bloody spaghetti trying to conquer his most famous acoustic tune, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, which see:

That was a fairly simple rendition, by the way.   He closed his solo set with the song – and he’s taken up jamming on the bass part, throwing in a few dramatic, swooping descents, all the while picking the high part.

All the while singing the song.   I can barely think the three things at the same time, much less pull them off on the guitar.

No, I can’t describe it any better.

After the acoustic set, the Richard Thompson Electric Trio – drummer David Jerome and bassist Michael Faraday (or so it sounded from the stage – I didn’t catch his name, and can’t find a reference to him online) – took over.

This being the first time I’d seen Thompson live in almost 18 years, it was a little odd seeing him without some permutation of the band he’d been touring with since the seventies; the first four times I saw him, the band was some combination of Dave Mattacks on drums, Dave Pegg or Danny Thompson on bass, Pete Zorn/Clive Gregson/Christine Collister on guitars, keyboards, backup vocals and (with Zorn) sax.  That group of musicians was pretty much Thompson’s comfort zone for many years.

So the new band was a switch; Faraday (?) is a very solid, steady bass player – a human low-frequency metronome through the often-frenetic modulations in Thompson’s music.

Jerome, on the other hand, is a trip.  Formerly with Better than Ezra as well as a dizzying range of session work with everyone from KD Lang and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama to the Toadies and John Cale, he’s also been Thompson’s go to drummer since 2002’s Mock Tudor album.   Live, with an extremely stripped down kit, and plenty of room to stretch out in the power trio format, he’s every bit as eclectic and all over the map as Thompson himself – sort of an improvisational jazz drummer in an Brit folk-rock world.

Which often lends the band a feeling that everything could spin out of control, like driving too fast along a cliffside road.  And yet, it never does.

The show was notably light on older material – which makes sense; how does someone who’s never had a “great hit” do a greatest hits tour?

Still, an artist like Thompson, with a body of work going back almost fifty years, could easily fill two hours with stuff that’d keep a crowd of long-time fans (like yours truly) happy without doing anything after 1990.

But with a few exceptions – “Valerie” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” from the solo set, and “For Shame of Doing Wrong”, “Wall of Death”, “Did She Jump (Or Was She Pushed)” and a madcap rave-up of “Tear-Stained Letter” with the band, most of the show was stuff from this past decade, mostly the last few albums.

And I could scarcely be happier.  While it’d be fun to curl up with songs from I Want To See The Bright Lights or Shoot Out The Lights or Across A Crowded Room would be fun and comfortable, that’d make a Thompson tour just another Rolling Stones tour, without the piles and piles of money.  If you’re not in it for the megabucks (not that Thompson doesn’t earn a respectable living as a touring cult favorite with a decent-sized fanatical following), I can see where staying creative can get pretty vital.

I’ll take a run at one highlight; the song “Guitar Heroes”, which Thompson dedicated with a wink and a nod to “Steve Vai and Joe Satriani”.  The song has nothing to do with either of them; the song jumps from its own (minor-key rockabilly) theme into stylized passages from “Melodie au Crepuscule” by Django Reinhardt, “Caravan” by Duke Ellington (with Juan Tizol on guitar), “Brenda Lee” by Chuck Berry, “Susie Q” (the pre-Creedence version) “F.B.I.” by the Shadows.

But it’s hard to pick a highlight; like all Thompson shows, I spent most of the evening, slack-jawed, realizing that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to play a guitar like that.

Which, I guess, is comforting in its own way.  After three and a half decades, five shows, a couple dozen albums, a marriage, three kids and three careers, at least that’s stayed a constant.

Look for a refund, if you bought tickets.

RIP, Scott Weiland, who apparently passed away in Bloomington last night.

We’ll always have 1995: