Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Winter is ending, Minnesota’s other season is beginning. The Wabasha Street bridge will be closed starting April 1st. That’s the route I usually take to work but in the spirit of enlightened progressiveness, I’m considering public transportation as an alternative.

The Metro Transit Trip Planner website says my ordinary route is Dale Street bus to Thomas, switch to Minnehaha bus to 5th and Cedar, then take the Signal Hills bus across the Wabasha Street Bridge to Plato and walk from there.

Cost $4.50 round trip, which is cheap: it’s 10 miles round trip at 57.5 cents IRS rate making the bus fare a buck and a quarter cheaper than what the IRS would allow for mileage in a private vehicle.

Trip time: 45 minutes each way or 90 minutes total, which is three times longer than my normal 30-minute drive time.

Is the extra hour of my time spent sitting on the bus worth more than I’d save by taking public transit instead of driving? Is my time worth more than $1.25 an hour? Barely; but yeah, I’d say so.

But wait . . . that’s before road construction shuts down the Wabasha Street bridge where the Signal Hills bus goes. They’ll have to detour it somewhere, probably Robert Street, and then who knows where it goes. Commute time gets longer. Bus-to-car value ratio goes even lower.

Maybe I should look into getting a bicycle?

Joe Doakes

it’s not the worst idea guy could have.

Although didn’t they just finish the Wabasha Street bridge, like, 25 years ago? It already needs repairs?

Signs your counterculture niche has either jumped the shark, or run out of things to be irate about.

Eleven seconds after Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for President, the left and media (ptr) declared he couldn’t possibly win because he was “too conservative”.

Of course, any conservative – especially the ones that provide a legitimate threat to the Democrats, or are endorsed at any rate – will be labelled “too conservative”.

Sturdevanted:  The mainstream media, and parts of the GOP establishment, and for that matter my moderate-Democrat father – are fond of practicing “Sturdevanting”; thinking that all our nation’s problems would be solved if the GOP became “less extreme” and the Democrat Party remained squirrel!   If we just had a GOP like the good old days – the Gerald Fords and the Dave Jenningses and the Arne Carlsons – who were willing to work with the Gus Halls and Rudy Perpiches and Paul Wellstones (and indulge their most wacked-out “progressive” pipe dreams), all would be just hunky dory.

Of course, there’s method to the madness; so much, in fact, that it’s The Law.

Threat Reduction:  Berg’s Eighth Law to be exact: “The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected”.   (There are a number of corollaries, ending with the Reagan Corollary, which is pretty germane today: “The Media and Left (pardon the redundancy) will try to destroy the conservative they are most afraid of”).

Now, Ted Cruz isn’t my top choice; as I noted the other day, he’s behind Walker, Jindal, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio on my list, so far.

And there may be reasons he can’t win; being “too conservative” isn’t one of them.

And by “too conservative”, I mean in a modern American context; proclaiming oneself king, calling for the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire and the re-institution of flogging in the Navy are pretty much off the table, realistically.

But in that American context?

Mitt Romney didn’t lose because he was too conservative; he outpolled Obama among “independent” and “moderate” voters.  No, Mitt lost because 400,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Colorado stayed home.  400,000 Republicans that had showed up for previous elections, but decided they had better things to do on a Tuesday night.

And they didn’t stay home because Mitt was too conservative.

Kevin Williamson at NRO notes that Sturdevanting, and other violations of Berg’s 11th Law, have a long, storied history:

“Reagan can’t win, Ford says.” That’s the 1976 version. The 1980 New York Times version, with the nearly identical headline: “Ford Declares Reagan Can’t Win.” Ford was really quite sure of himself: “Every place I go, and everything I hear, there is a growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election.” New York magazine: “The reason Reagan can’t win. . . . ” “Preposterous,” sociologist Robert Coles wrote about the idea of a Reagan victory. The founder of this magazine worried that Reagan simply could not win in 1980, and several National Review luminaries quietly hoped that George H. W. Bush would be the nominee. There were serious, thoughtful conservatives who thought in 1980 that their best hope was to have Daniel Patrick Moynihan run as a Democrat that year, while many others were looking to ex-Democrat John Connally to carry the conservative banner on the GOP side. Things have a funny way of working out differently than expected. (And then much, much differently.)

And of course, if you’re a conservative, there’s another angle to it:

Will he be the nominee? Good Lord, who knows or cares at this point? It’s a question mainly of interest to Ted Cruz and his rivals, and maybe to their sainted mothers. That we are so fascinated by the possibility is further evidence of the corrosive cult of the presidency — we conservatives should know better than to wait for the anointing of a savior.

Take that, Ron Paul supporters.

Anyway – is there such a thing as “too conservative?”  Maybe. Is anyone to the left of Mike Huckabee the one to tell a conservative/republican/libertarian what that means?

No.  Not at all.

…when you realize we would have seen better to this nation’s healthcare by giving every single American $50,000 to spend on it.

She also “the War on Poverty”.

Major kudos to this Irish TV reporter for getting through this live report…

…without breaking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Women’s group wants to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.  Time for more women on the money, and besides, he was Bad because he enforced the Indian Removal law passed by Congress, which modern Liberals claim was genocide but which Conservative scholars claim averted genocide (if the Indians hadn’t been relocated West, they’d have been wiped out by Eastern Whites).

The women recommend Rachel Carson instead, the “a marine biologist who wrote the hugely influential environmental book ‘Silent Spring.’  That was the book that urged the ban on DDT, the most effective way to kill tsetse flies.   Millions of Blacks now suffer from malaria.

Or Margaret Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in America because society needed to kill mentally ill and defective babies.  Which tended to come from families that lacked proper nutrition and health care.  Mostly Black.

Or Betty Friedan, who wrote “The Feminine Mystique” to launch the modern feminist movement by ridiculing stay-at-home-motherhood, saying “. . . housewives are mindless and thing-hungry . . . housework is particularly suited to the capabilities of feeble-minded girls.”

Is it just me, or is there a bit of elitism going on here?  The $1 Susan B. and Saca-bucks aren’t large enough denominations, gotta be $20?  Maybe we can bring back the $1,000 after Hilary gets her email account sorted.

Joe Doakes

I’m sure it’s all in the works.

Up there with Easter, Christmas, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, this coming Saturday is one of the most wonderful times of the year.

It’s the Shooter Show at Bill’s Gun Shop and Range in Robbinsdale.

Shopping for a new gun?  Dozens of manufacturers will be there, showing their wares.  Bring a driver’s license, buy a box of ammo, and you can test fire any of the hundreds of pieces for free.  Prices are coming down from the panic-buying highs of a couple years ago, so it’s a great time to buy!

Plus – door prizes and giveaways (accessories, goodies, and even firearms), charity raffles (ditto), and…

…ahem…

…full-automatic machine gun rentals.  Buy a box of ammo, take your pick, pony up, suit up, and poke more holes in more paper faster than you ever knew possible.  Last year I shot the M1928 Thompson and the KRISS.   This year?  I’m focusing on the Bren, and/or the BAR.

Oh, yeah – I’ll be doing the show from Bill’s, live from 1-3PM on Saturday.  Stop out and say hi.

Why yes – I’ve been looking forward to this all year long.

The Minneapolis public school district expects to realize a savings of about $11 million when it completes his layoff of about 100 administrative staff from its headquarters building.

The district’s line is the savings are going to go back to the classroom – including potentially allowing the middle and high schools to add an extra hour onto their curricula.

Those of us who live in the conservative, real world know what this actually means – but i’ll break it down for the rest of the audience:

Now that they’re forced to cut administrators, they can focus more money on education. 

See the priorities?

Minneapolis has been systematically shorting students, their classrooms, and the curricula to keep their administrative payrolls fat and happy. Now that declining enrollments have the district in trouble, the piper needs to be paid.

This has to be at least as much the case in St. Paul, where the district headquarters building, in the Stalinesque fortress at 360 Colborne St., is more stuffed with deadwood than Lake of the Woods after the big windstorm.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Arrest made in Ferguson cop shootings.  Suspect admitted shooting but not at cops; he shot at other people and missed.

What do we always tell hunters:  Be Aware Of Your Backstop!!

Since he was only charged with assault for shooting a cop in the face, then I guess police lives do NOT matter and we can stop hearing about it.

Also, the news reports say the suspect had an outstanding warrant for receiving stolen property.  That’s “undocumented property,” morons.

Joe Doakes

What?  No trigger warning?

(Ba domp bomp)

To:  Thom Yorke; Leader, Radiohead
From: Mhitch Berge, uppity music buff
Re: Marketing Idea

Mr. Yorke,

While I’ve never been a big fan of Radiohead’s music, I’ve always enjoyed your marketing innovations.

You were the first major artist to put all your music online.  You were the first to try a “pay us what you want” pricing model.

Of course, other models have come and gone.  But I’m going to propose something to vault you ahead of everyone else.

Post your master recordings online.

Make the Logic or ProTools masters (or get really radical and export them to GarageBand and Audacity) available for anyone to download, remix, re-record, add their own vocals, or whatever.  Become the first open-source superstars.

Have your people call my people.

That is all.

Although Ted Cruz is a Little ways down my short list of presidential candidates in 2016 (behind Walker, Jindal, Paul and Rubio), I just found one extremely compelling reason to think about supporting him.

Last week, when stickers labeling establishments as “exclusively for white people” went up around Austin, Texas, I quietly figured it had to be a “progressive” false flag.

Why?

Because Bergs Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”), that’s why.

So – were those “exclusively for white people” stickers a progressive false flag?

Duh…:

[Austin lawyer] Adam Reposa posted the video on YouTube and made a statement on Facebook saying he was trying promote the issue of gentrification in East Austin. (Warning: The video contains explicit language)
“They’re getting pushed out, and pretty quick. This area of town is turning into white’s only,” Reposa said in the clip. “Not by law like it used to be, and everyone’s going to jump on, ‘that’s racist!’ ‘that’s racist!’ Man, this town, the way **** works is racist! And I knew I could just bait all of y’all into being as stupid as you are.”
Reposa went on to blast people for not getting the message.

“You’re just not smart enough to keep up with my argument!”

I started Berg’s Law as a joke, pretty much, back in 2004. But the more I see, the less funny they seem.

Except, of course, is that I still laugh my butt off at “progressives”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Prime Minister of Hungary gave his State of the Nation address. Love this line:

“And as far as I see it, Hungarian people are by nature politically incorrect – in other words, they have not yet lost their common sense.”

The Republicans should run this guy against Hillary  No, he wasn’t born in this country.  What difference, at this point, does it make?

Joe Doakes

And trying read Hungarian is about the same as trying to read most legal writing…

Who in the flaming hootie-hoo are the other 32%?

Hard to believe it was fifteen years ago last Saturday that Kids in Philly by Marah was released.

Here they are on the old Conan show:

They’re still out there, and still putting out enough great stuff that it’s a shock it’s been so long.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Ramsey County doesn’t use District Court Judges to hear Family Law cases, they use Referees who hold hearings, swear witnesses, take testimony, and recommends Findings and Conclusions for final Decree to be signed by the real judge.  Anybody out there interested in spend all day, every day, listening to divorcing couples bicker?  Oh, and you also get to wallow in domestic abuse and listen to excuses from juvenile delinquents.

On the other hand, it pays well.

***

The Second Judicial District has the following job opportunity available:

Referee (2 positions available)

Applications accepted until 4:30 p.m., March 27, 2015

How much worse than “having teenagers” could it be?

At roof-top levels, the British de Havilland Mosquito F.B.VI fast bombers buzzed through the heart of Copenhagen on March 21st, 1945.  The 18 bombers, supported by 30 P-51 Mustang fighters, raced past shocked German anti-aircraft gunners.

Their target was the Shellhus, the headquarters of the Gestapo in occupied-Denmark.  With Allied forces breaking through the German lines in both the East and West, the sense that the war had but months or weeks or go was becoming rapidly apparent.  For the dozens of Danish resistance fighters imprisoned in the Shellhus, an attack by the RAF might be their only hope of escaping execution.  Despite the risks of attacking a target in the middle of a heavily-fortified city, both for civilians and attacking pilots (one plane flew so low that it was clipped by a lamp post), the British went ahead.

The raid would be among the last acts in the unique history of Denmark’s survival under Nazi occupation.

—

Danish troops the morning of the German invasion in 1940 – 2 of the young men in this photo were killed later that day. In all, it only took the Germans 6 hours to subdue Denmark – the shortest campaign of World War II

The history of Nazi Germany’s occupation throughout Europe was one of human degradation and political humiliation for the vanquished.  Where German boots touched the ground, the Nazis found either willing collaborators like Norway’s Vidkun Quisling or politically expedient allies like the Vichy French.  Whether direct or in-direct, Nazi rule bled into every facet of the society of its occupied victims.

Except in Denmark. Read the rest of this entry »

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!

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!

The educational establishment is calling in its markers with the mainstream media, and beating the drums against charter schools in particular, and school choice in general.

Of course, it’s the same set of out of context factoids they trot out every 2-3 years.

Finances:  Some charter schools have a hard time making a financial go of it.  Of course they do; they can’t run to the taxpayer and crank up the local education mill levy (“for the children!”) whenever they spend their way into a hole, the way the district schools can.

Grades:  Some charter schools, especially schools in urban areas catering to black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and Native American kids. lag the public districts in terms of achievement.  We’ve been through this; back in 2009, after Nick Coleman joined into a previous round of catcalling charters, I ran through the stats.  Some charters – including many urban charters full of minority and immigrant kids – spanked the public districts.  Others lagged.

Paternalism:  The great unstated fact that none of charters’ opponents ever addresses; 80% of urban charter kids are minorities and immigrants.  Every black, Latino, Asian, Native or Somali kid that leaves the public school system is leaving the the reservation that the DFL is counting on to train its future voter base.

But charters in the city – especially the ones catering to older kids – have two handicaps, as I showed in 2009:

• Burnout:  They take a disproportionate number of kids who’ve been terribly failed by the district schools, and have had their love of learning – something pretty much every child is born with – beaten out of them pretty decisively.  It takes a good charter some time to help a kid back to the point where he or she gives a crap again.  With some, it never works.  With others, it does – but rarely overnight.
• Cooked Testing Books:  After age 16, the big district schools can shunt their less-enthusiastic students, or the ones with difficulties (criminal records, kids of their own, and on and on) off into the “Alternative Learning Centers”, or ALCs.  There, they’re off the books; their test scores aren’t held against the district.  Charters have no such option; every kid’s score counts.

If someone in the educational-industrial complex ever wanted to get the fact about charter schools versus public schools, they could do two things:

1. Cut The Umbilical Cord:  Let public schools exist on their per-student allotments and whatever money they could raise themselves.  I know.  It’ll never happen.  If it did, over half of public schools would shut down in a year.
2. Longitudinal Testing:  Every single current comparison of public and charter school achievement relies on straight-up comparisons on how students are doing right now.  They are the average score of every student in the charter school, versus the average of every kid in the public school that hasn’t been shunted into a diversion program.  But if they did a longitudinal study comparing how individual students did over time – specifically, comparing how students who left public schools with low achievement fared over the rest of their educational career, versus control groups of similar kids who stayed in the public systems – that would be more accurate (and, given the graduation rates for Twin Cities public schools, more damning.

But we’ve been through all this before.

The real question today is, what’s behind this latest round of out-of-context piss-balloon-throwing from the educational-industrial complex?  Why are they attacking charter schools this time?    Why is Big Education’s propaganda machine going to work to slag the hundred labors of love that make up the Minnesota charter school sector?

Why?  Oh, why?

Oh, right.   Minorities getting all uppity.   And as they leave the public districts, that’s a lot of jobs, and funding, for the political class that are harder to justify.

It must be stopped.

And that’s why the left’s useful idiots are attacking charters this year.   And next year.

I’ve always been curious about things like this (seen on Facebook yesterday):

Foreigners are “baffled by how much water is wasted…while other places in the world are in desperate need of water?”

When foreigners flush a toilet, where do they think the water goes?  Do they think it gets destroyed?   Sent into an alternate universe via a wormhole in time?

That water goes to a treatment plant of some kind or another; usually the icky stuff gets separated out, and the water goes into a holding lake, where it filters down back into the groundwater, or evaporates back into the atmosphere, to fall somewhere in the world as rain, or to float around as humidity, or (mostly) sit in the ocean.

And it’s water that’s here.  Does an American have the option of sending water from his toilet – or from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River, for that matter – to Ethiopia or the Gobi Desert?   Is there an alternate flush button we could push to send the water (waste-free, natch) to the horn of Africa?

Who are these “foreigners” with no knowledge of the evaporation cycle, anyway?

I mean, who are we to say, really?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I must be getting old.  I hear lies and remember hearing them before.

Bill Clinton wanted to ban “cop-killer” bullets in the 90’s.   Barack Obama wants to ban cop-killer bullets now.

Still not one cop killed by those bullets, yet the lie is recycled as if nobody ever heard it told, or heard it refuted.  Does the entire country have Alzheimer’s?  Can’t anybody remember we went through this once before, and why it was dumb then so it’s just as dumb now?

Interestingly, public reaction to the lie has changed.  In Bill Clinton’s day, everybody was on board with supporting local law enforcement.  Nowadays, a lot more people seem to think “Politicians and the media promise me cops are racists who delight in shooting Gentle Giants holding their hands up, so why should cops get special protection?”  Lot more push-back and ATF was much quicker to pull the ban proposal “for further study.”

It boils down to a difference in philosophy:

Liberals believe that if you tear down enough of the institutions that brought order out of chaos, the result will be utopia.

I suspect that’s too optimistic – I suspect Heinlein and Burke were right, the result will be a reversion to chaos.

Joe Doakes

Part of it – the liberal part – is as Joe describes.

There’s also a more libertarian streak to the GOP that didn’t exist 20 years ago.  While the GOP still has all sorts of law-enforcement fanboys who figure if the cops say, do, or arrest it, they must be right, there are a few more who believe restraint is in order.

SCENE: Mitch BERG walks into a Starbucks and approaches the order counter.  Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, the barrista, is behind the counter.

BERG:  Large light roast and some of that lemon cake, please.

BIRKENSTOCK:  Sure.  But first – what do you think about race?

BERG:  Huh?

David “Iowahawk” Burge writes a rare, “not funny” tweet:

And he’s spent more time and effort fighting domestic dissent in the US – via the IRS’ gundecking conservative groups’ free speech via tax and campaign law and attacking dissenters, via “net neutrality”, and via his eternal campaign’s patrolling masses of droogs (in and out of the media), than he spent bringing free speech to the people of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba or anyplace else.

“Stand Your Ground” is back.

The bill – which would do nothing but remove the “duty to retreat” from self-defense on your property and in your car – was slandered as a “Shoot First” bill three years ago when it was passed by a bipartisan majority in both chambers (which, as an aside, is positive proof that the opposition was looking for the stupid vote; does anyone knows what happens to the person who shoots second?).  Governor Messinger Dayton issued a veto that was bought and paid for by big anti-gun interests; the metrocrats that controlled the Legislature at the time didn’t override him.

This year’s edition has a bipartisan slate of authors, a decisive majority of support in the House, and enough support in the Senate to make it interesting…

…and a governor – Tina Flint Smith – who will veto it forthwith (by pulling wires attached to Mark Dayton’s writing hand).

Of course, the point with this bill – and Senator Branden Petersen’s “Constitutional Carry” bill – is to do what the Second Amendment movement did over the previous two DFL-controlled sessions; rack up anti-gun votes by DFLers in greater Minnesota.  The DFL got trounced outstate in the 2014 elections in large part on the strength of gun votes; it can happen in the Senate in 2016.

Which is exactly how we got “Shall Issue” carry permits 12 years ago.

I worry at times that the lessons from the Carry Permit battle have been lost to a generation of pro-gun activists.  Shall Issue took from 1995 to 2003 (and again in 2005) to pass.  Eight years (with another year of maneuvering around a pet DFL judge).  It involved playing political chess, not checkers.

So suit up, people.  Winning your freedom isn’t for the faint of heart.