…that if I voted GOP, plutocrats would romp and frolic.

And they were right.

…on foreign policy and defense, the more I see of this kind of talk, of a 14.5% flat income tax for individuals and businesses…:

So on Thursday I am announcing an over $2 trillion tax cut that would repeal the entire IRS tax code—more than 70,000 pages—and replace it with a low, broad-based tax of 14.5% on individuals and businesses. I would eliminate nearly every special-interest loophole. The plan also eliminates the payroll tax on workers and several federal taxes outright, including gift and estate taxes, telephone taxes, and all duties and tariffs. I call this “The Fair and Flat Tax.” . . .Even Mr. Obama’s economic advisers tell him that the U.S. corporate tax code, which has the highest rates in the world (35%), is an economic drag. When an iconic American company like Burger King wants to renounce its citizenship for Canada because that country’s tax rates are so much lower, there’s a fundamental problem.

 

…the more I want him to remain a contender.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

How many specialty license plates do we need?

joe doakes

Enh.  I’ll cut the veterans some slack.

I’ll draw the line at “Cis-Female Veteran”.

But, unfortunately, of course it does.

A long-time friend of this blog emails:

President Obama specifically said that the Charleston type killings did not happen in other Western countries.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/at-least-two-killed-in-austria-after-man-drives-into-crowd-before-stabbing-passersby-in-graz-10333891.html

Perhaps it was lost in translation because we know he can’t speak Austrian.

Your friend,
[Redacted]

On the one hand, I’m inclined to cut people breaks when it comes to languages – and Austrian does have a different accent, vocabulary and style than German.

On the other hand, there’s no way that the president who went Queen Elizabeth the Blueray collection of Eastenders for a Golden Jubilee present [1] knows that.

I’m pretty sure Obama once told a “Crocodile Dundee” joke when speaking to the Austrian ambassador.

[1] Or whatever it was.

Change is all around us.
Some things – technology, reality TV, the Dow – change very quickly.

Others – glaciers, the cityscape or landscape around you – change so slowly as to be imperceptible, until you look at a time lapse photograph or think back over 20 years in a place, and go “wow –  that snuck up on me”.

Indeed, the “expanding universe” model of astrophysics says that literally every single thing in the universe is changing, all the time.

There is only one thing in all of the known universe that is not changing. And that is…: 

… Oliver Willis will always be Oliver Willis.

Associating ones opponents with all that is evil in the world – the lowest behavior, the highest crimes, the grossest infractions against decency – is always the number one standby of demagogues, and intellectual thugs, and the propagandists that pimp their message.

I saw this on a highly on a highly over-trafficked lefty Facebook page the other day: 
Now, don’t get me wrong – i’m not going to say this is what every “progressive” believes in the deepest pit of their heart.  Indeed, it’s tempting to chalk it up to the likes of the heinous AM950 audience (or on air staff).

But that is just as much an oversimplification.

I heard the same basic sentiment a couple of years ago – that failure to support a law that the administration had pushed through was tantamount to treason – in a comment thread on the Facebook page of a  left of center friend of mine, from a woman who had a non-trivial, six-figure education.

Anyway.

Addlepated as it is, and whoever the audience is, it’s of a piece with “there’s a Republican war on women!” and “and rampage killings don’t have been in other countries!” and  “The DFL will lower property taxes!”; it’s intended to scare, and bamboozle, people who don’t no much and don’t have much interest in learning the truth.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Let’s talk about liars.

Progressives claim they speak Truth to Power to effect Change.  They view themselves as warriors for social justice, all members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, bravely pounding out their messages of hate in the service of a Higher Calling: Hope and Change.  For these courageous soldiers in the war on Everything Traditional, no tactic is too extreme, not even the Fake Review.

Suppose a Non-Progressive author has a new book on Amazon.  Suppose it’s getting great reviews from customers who bought the book and actually read it.  That can’t be allowed to continue . . . innocent readers might believe the high ratings, purchase the book and have their minds polluted with Non-Progressive Thinking.  Plainly, it is the duty of every good SJW to fight those high ratings by posting their own one-star reviews.   That will bring down the average rating to the point where innocents will conclude the book sucks and they won’t buy it, which will not only preserve blank minds to be filled with Progressive indoctrination, but also will hurt the Non-Progressive author’s wallet in the form of lost sales – a two-fer!

We saw that last spring, with the controversy over the River Oasis Cafe in Stillwater posting a “minimum wage fee” on its receipts; Yelp readers from all over the country who couldn’t possibly have ever visited the place left scathing, often disgusting and scatological, reviews on the online restaurant review site.  Dissent must be crushed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Chin documents Deadly Force Incidents on faith based properties.  They’re by no means rare.  Peter Johnson is with Archway Defense, and works in church security. Peter reference my post “A Tale of Two Churches”.

Here’s Twila Brase’s interview on Daily Caller with Ginny Thomas.

How can you help Jon Heyer?  Here’s the site.  Do it by June 30, and get  your $50 back.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• Peter Johnson will talk about church security
• Twila Brase will talk about the latest in healthcare freedom and her interview in Dailiy Caller with Ginny Thomas (wife of a certain SCOTUS justice who Ryan Winkler said something really dumb about…)
• Jon Heyer joins us to talk about his plans in MN 66A – Heather Martens’ district.

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!

Call me a cynic…

…no.  Call Barack Obama a Cynic.

Our Ghoulish President:  The bodies were literally not cold from the Charleston shooting when the President started trying to politicize the incident:

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he continued. “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Tell it to Charlie Hebdo.

Sure it happens in other countries.  A sickening amount of it.  The US doesn’t even top the list on most categories of “rampage killing”. Not even the “religious or hate crimes” category, where the US isn’t even in the top five (Roof is tied for seventh).  And who’da thunk it; car-crazy Americans barely make the top ten in vehicular spree-killings.   [1]

The US is not uniquely violent – indeed, the left’s constant claim that we’re the most violent country in the world is  wishful thinking.  While the rate is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, it is higher than European countries – whose populations tend to be small, homogenous and very orderly.  Among large, populous, heterogenous industrial states, Russia and Argentina and Brazil, among others, all have much higher murder rates.

The President is not talking fact.

Read the rest of this entry »

First things first: Like every human being with a living soul, I abhor the violence that took place yesterday in Charleston, South Carolina.

While one can expect the Obama Justice Department’s to politicize this episode for all it’s worth (more later), in this case the hate crime investigation seems entirely warranted; the alleged shooter, who seems at first glance to be a fairly demented young man, gives off a lot of the surface signs of being motivated by some form of racial hatred or another, rather than mere insanity.

Read the rest of this entry »

…Victor Davis Hanson, then you are part of the problem.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails as part of a theme he’s had for a couple days:

My neighbor just renewed her Permit to Reproduce.  She’s good to go for another five years.

You didn’t know about that?  Oh yes, it turns out that Deciding to Have a Child is not a Right protected by the Constitution, it’s a Privilege given by the government to those who qualify.  Applicants must be over 21 years of age, reside in this country legally, take a class at personal expense, demonstrate proper technique before a certified evaluator, show photo ID and submit an application with payment of fees to the County, authorize release of medical data and criminal history . . . it’s fairly involved, requires planning ahead and costs a bit of money.  But the permit is necessary to ensure no child is born unwanted, or born into poverty.  It’s a common sense birth-control requirement.

Wait, did I say Reproduce?  I meant Carry.  Sorry, my bad.

Joe Doakes

Someone’s gotta make sure we’re using our rights correctly.

Former Senator and two-time Presidential hopeful John Edwards was an immensely tragic figure, in a purely satirical sense, in that he may have been the only Democrat candidate in history to be derailed by violating conventional prole social mores.

But he made one great contribution to American life; the phrase starting “There are Two Americas…”.  This is a gift that has kept on giving to satirists, and likely always will.

But in some cases, it doesn’t go far enough.

Because in cities like Saint Paul, at least in re the Met and City Councils’ ongoing plans to bike-ify the streets and make driving cars utterly unpalatable, there are three Saint Pauls:

The Midway, Saint Anthony Park, Merriam Park, Battle Creek, Payne-Phalen, Summit-Uni and the like:  In these neighborhoods, there is a minority of bikers – and no real resistance to the idea of having the neighborhood’s streets whittled down to one lane plus bike lanes and, maybe, parking.

The East Side, The North End, Frogtown, Dayton’s Bluff:  Nobody bikes, and nobody wants to build bike lanes through them.

Highland:  A powerful minority of well-connected bikers went up against a powerful minority of well-organized NOMASs (“Not On My Arterial Steet!”) – and the NOMAS won a victory, even if only temporary.

The council voted 6-0 for Council Member Chris Tolbert’s amendment to study possible bike lanes on Finn Street and Prior Avenue as well as Cleveland, and to ask the Public Works department to draw up “a robust public engagement plan” to get more input from residents, business owners, district councils and others before deciding by the end of the year where to put the lanes.

Finn?  That’s narrow enough already!

Prior?  That’s two blocks from Cleveland!

And four blocks from already bike-friendly Fairview.

Tolbert said based on the feedback he had gotten — “the most public engagement I’ve received since I’ve been on the council” — he wasn’t sure the issue had been properly vetted. He represents the area south of St. Clair Avenue, where business and property owners said they had collected more than 1,000 signatures opposing bike lanes down Cleveland.

“Both sides have brought up a lot of good issues and a lot of issues that need to be resolved, and we haven’t had a lot of time to let that happen,” Tolbert said.

Now, in most cases – see “The Green Line”, the “Lebanon Hills Park Bike Path” – the “public engagement” is just a ticket the bureaucracy punches on the way to doing what it had planned all along.

In this case?  NOMAS in Highland Park might actually bring some teeth to the issue.

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is marching at a minimum wage protest outside a local coffee shop.  Mitch BERG walks out.  LIBRELLE sees him. 

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG:  Oh, hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE:  People who work deserve to earn a living!

BERG:  Hm.  OK – let’s say that you need your pipes repaired…

LIBRELLE:  I do!  I have eco-friendly biodegradable pipes in my house.

BERG:  Of course you do.  So – I, an English major, come over to fix your pipes.  I have no plumbing skills whatsoever.  But I will no doubt work very hard to try to do the job.  So – do I “deserve” $15 an hour?

LIBRELLE:  Well, if you can find a plumber who can work for $15 an hour, that’s an incredible bargain!

BERG:  Not if he can’t do the job.  And you’re deflecting.  The point is, if I have no skill worth spending any money for, why do I “deserve to make a living”.

LIBRELLE:  [Holds arms up across face]

BERG:  What’s that?

LIBRELLE:  I’m blocking you.

BERG:  Huh?

LIBRELLE:  That’s what I do on my “Minimum Wage Activist” facebook page; I block people who just don’t get it.

BERG:  Huh.  [Holds up arms across own face]

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate communication?

And SCENE

The  Cheapo Recorxs in Uptown Minneapolis is closing this fall, to be replaced by one of those ofay, mixed use condominium buildings that are starting to choke the neighborhood.

To which many of my readers will say “meh”.  Shopping for physical things in stores is passé, were told.

I think it’s a huge loss. Partly it’s because I hate shopping online. Having worked in e-commerce, I don’t trust e-commerce. 

More so it’s because, like bookstores – which we are also told are on the way out – they are relics from the time before social media, when people actually had to be social to do things like, you know, buy music and books.

Our devices have convinced many of us that we are always more busy than we used to be, and that more than a few minutes browsing for music — especially something other than an MP3 or stream — is outdated. Why spend even a couple minutes walking down aisles just to find the genre of your choosing when a search bar awaits?

Of course, there are still music stores out there; Hymie’s, The Electric Fetus, and if you’re into hip-hop, Urban Lights are all thriving.

Those are, of course, all “curated” stores – meaning that the music you find is dependent on the taste of the “curator”.  Don’t get me wrong – some of those “curators” are excellent.  

But how do you replace the broad, sweeping unpredictability of a Cheapo?

And don’t say “on iTunes” or “try Spotify!”.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I’ve never downloaded or streamed music.  But shopping for our music and books in the same place we do our Facebook cat pictures, our taxes, our blogging? Why not do all of our eating and sleeping in the same place, while were at it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My neighbor just renewed her Permit to Publish. She’s good to go for another five years.

You didn’t know about that? Oh yes, it turns out that Publishing a blog is not a Right protected by the Constitution, it’s a Privilege given by the government to those who qualify. Applicants must be over 21 years of age, reside in this country legally, take a class at personal expense, demonstrate proper technique before a certified evaluator, show photo ID and submit an application with payment of fees to the County, authorize release of medical data and criminal history . . . it’s fairly involved, requires planning ahead and costs a bit of money. But the permit is necessary to ensure safe spaces for readers, free of controversial opinions and micro-aggressions. It’s a common sense speech-control requirement.

Wait, did I say Publish? I meant Carry. Sorry, my bad.

Joe Doakes

It’s OK.  In another generations, everyone will grow up believing rights come from government.

Rachel Dolezal has “identified” as black since she was 5.

I’ve “identified” as a Chicago Bears middle linebacker, an F-15 pilot, as James Honeyman-Scott (albeit not dead) and as a very wealthy guy since I was 6, 12, 16 and 35, respectively.

Let’s show those cis-athletes, cis-pilots, cis-rock starts and cis-plutocrats who’s boss, shall we?

Between them, Marco Rubio and O. J. Simpson have killed two people.

Among them, Marco Rubio and Bernie Madoff scammed people out of $20 billion.

Together, Marco Rubio and the Minnesota Vikings have lost four Super Bowls.

Marco Rubio and Keith Ellison have, together, 40 unpaid parking tickets and 11 moving violations.

Get right on that.

What?  Donald Trump running for President again?

Good lord, who the hell cares?

Well, Kevin Williamson does, if only long enough to write the title of the day for yesterday:

“Witless Ape Rides Escalator“

Oh, yeah -and an article worthy of the title.

Enough is enough.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My neighbor just renewed her Permit to Vote.  She’s good to go for another five years.

You didn’t know about that?  Oh yes, it turns out that voting is not a Right protected by the Constitution, it’s a Privilege given by the government to those who qualify.  Applicants must be over 21 years of age, reside in this country legally, take a class at personal expense, demonstrate proper technique before a certified evaluator, show photo ID and submit an application with payment of fees to the County, authorize release of medical data and criminal history . . . it’s fairly involved, requires planning ahead and costs a bit of money.  But the permit is necessary to ensure the integrity of the election process which is the foundation of American government, so it’s a common sense voter-control requirement.

Wait, did I say Vote?  I meant Carry.  Sorry, my bad.

Joe Doakes

This could lead to all sort of “Vote Safety” legislation

Congrats!

After a couple of years of diligent reporting about the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s coverup of priests’ involvement in sexual abuse of minors (especially by MPR), you have convinced the Vatican to completely toss the Archdioce’s leadership.

Bully.

Now, when the scent of that glorious celebration (at the Amsterdam?  WA Frost?  The Lex?) has faded from your journalistic nostrils, we’ve got a couple more stories for you to cover.

Bill Clinton, beloved of our cultural elites (including most of you in the media, whom he treated like the old pals you longed to be), has been linked at the hip with an industrial-grade pedophile.

And the AP found that 2,500 teachers have have been punished for one degree of sexual abuse of students or another in the past five years.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve not heard of any time at which 500 priests per year were being rung up on sexual abuse charges.  Have you?

You’ve spent the past couple years investigating the tolerance of tolerance of sexual abuse in high places within a major institution.  Well, we’ve got another major institution for you to look into, and involvement in still more in some very high places to dig into.

Never let it be said I’m not here to help.

Sales figures for the first couple of days for Trulbert:  A Comic Novella about the End of the World As We Know It are coming in:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#5,713 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#16 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Political

#31 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Political

#77 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > General Humor

I guess that means I’ve made at least one best-seller list…

Fresch Fisch, from Saint Paul, emails:

Currently happening, June 11 to 16. Alexandria MN.  5600 students high school Trap students participating in the MN High School Clay Target Championships! Six full days, six divisions, 900+ students per day.

You say, just what does the largest shooting competition in the world look like? A drone’s eye view!

I was there Sunday and it was totally awesome.

http://mnclaytarget.com/

Not only is it the fastest growing high school sport in Minnesota and America, but it gives the world’s Bloombots acid reflux.

And that alone is an unalloyed good.