The “Blue Line” – the Ventura Trolley, built down a right of way that either been cleared of obstsructions in the sixties, or built high above it – went several months before taking out its first vehicular rival.

The Green Line – drilled down the middle of one of the busiest streets in the Metro?  It didn’t even last a day (and that’s leaving out the four train-on-car accidents during testing).

My prediction in the first year:  12 train-on-car accidents.  Three fatalities (at least one of them in a car, and at least one staggering out of the Trend, Arnelia’s or Christenson’s.

If this were in Minnesota, the target would be a “Medtronic” logo [1].

Otherwise, it’s a perfect representation of Minnesota in 2014.

[1] Or any other smaller MN business as well…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Five crashes result from mixing trains with cars in the same space.  So far.

You seem surprised. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.  The system is working as designed, to drive vehicle traffic off the streets.

Soon black market cars will steal away every chance they can, through back yards to alleys and dusty roads, working on their night moves.  The rest will be up on blocks.  To save the planet for the children.  And the bicyclists.

Joe Doakes

I’m surprised they didn’t mount a chisel plow on the front of the trains.

It’s doing wonders for traffic on Marshall and Pierce Butler.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The number of people laid off rose again slightly.  That’s remarkable, since hardly anybody is working to BE laid off.  This is not good economic news.

Joe Doakes

The Administration’s economic “strategy” seems to have been “fake it til you make it”; if you say the economy is improving enough times, maybe it will…

They say that dissatisfaction with the status-quo – everything from trite “anti-incumbency” to a genuine disgust with the power-mad “House Of Cards”-like ways of Washington (which Obama certainly didn’t invent, but which he’s moved front and center as the defining feature of his reign) will be the driving force in this fall’s election, and possibly 2016 as well.

To ensure that it is, I submit to you a few exhibits that show with crystalline clarity the contempt Obama’s Washington establishement feels for the electorate, whom they seem to believe couldn’t wipe and wash without their help:

The Master Of The Universe:   bit here, about yet another vapid, vacuous Obama staffer “slipping up and telling the truth” about his, and the Administration’s, view of the unwashed masses; it’s Tommy Vietor, one of the Administration’s spokes-drones:

“Iraq is just a ploy to distract you from Bergdahl which distracted you from the VA scandal which distracted you from BENGHAZI. Idiots,”

Seething contempt for the bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks who’d dare question their betters?  The little prick is soaking in it!

Look at his picture at the link above; you can tell the little fop went to Georgetown, hasn’t had a job outside politics in his life, and doesn’t even look out the window when he’s flying to the west coast.

He’s not the poster-child for tearing down the establishment – but only because there are so many other options.

The Brahmins:  Juan Williams indulged in another of the left’s parlour games, “Let’s Compare Degrees!”, on “America’s Newsroom” last week; I’ll add emphasis:

WILLIAMS: It comes in a week in which she said they were dead broke when they left the White House, and that set off conservative blogs, and now this one coming from Rush Limbaugh. I don’t know if he wants to test his Mensa score versus Hillary. I mean, you know, she’s a big-time college grad. But I think what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to deflate a balloon here in that what he said later in that monologue was that Hillary Clinton is supposed to be the brightest woman ever, the most competent woman, and therefore she can be president, and he wants to take down that whole structure right now.

Did you see what Hillary! accomplished during her term at State?

No?

Neither did anyone else.

Williams indulges the liberal conceit that believes the name on ones diploma confers, by itself, excellence.  But most Americans know that the best thing, indeed the only good thing, that an “elite” education says about a person is that between the ages of 14 and 18 they lived a life that was perfectly calculated to win the attention of an admissions committee, knowing that four years of playing the paper chase would give them the one thing of value that attending an “elite” institution really confers; access to the alumni directory.  And that’s the best thing it says about a person; in most cases – Hillary!’s among them – it means they were born into “Legacy” status (and if you read that and think “informal aristocracy”, you’re only wrong about the “informal” part).

For this good of this country, anyone with with an “elite” degree – or for that matter, anyone who’s been out of school more than three years who still talks about where they went to school – should be disqualified from public service.   As should anyone who refers to “Mensa” score unironically.

Pay no attention to the utter lack of accomplishment, peasants.

So you want to effect some change in Minnesota politics?  Perhaps right a wrong that you see?

What’s the best way to do it?

Spend years mustering supporters and changing public opinion?  Like the Tea Party?

Or sit in tents out on the sidewalk, warmed only by relentless NPR coverage, like “Occupy?”

Nonsense.  Just have a plutocrat father who had his office bought for him by your stepmom!

During an interview with the Post-Bulletin’s Editorial Board last week, Dayton said his sons Andrew and Eric Dayton have been making the case that tipped employees should be treated differently. His sons own the Minneapolis restaurant “The Bachelor Farmer.”

“It may be that we have to fine tune it. I understand my sons’ frustration with the tip credit issue. They make a very articulate case,” he said.

During the legislative session, the Minnesota Restaurant Association had pushed hard for a tiered tipped employee system. Under that proposal, an employee whose wages and tips equaled at least $12 per hour would be paid at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Dayton said his sons have said that the minimum wage increase means their wait staff will be making significantly more per hour than the dishwashers and other staff.

Wait…

…I seem to remember a governor’s race four years ago.  Where a candidate suggested exactly that.  And was pelted with pennies, to the gleeful tittering of the local media and left (ptr).

So the next time you’re a liberal dilettante and you find your hobby restaurant is being financially stressed by the DFL legislature’s innumerate noodling in the labor markets, just make sure an assembly of oligarchic plutocrats gets Dadders elected!

Problem solved!

SUPPLEMENTAL QUESTION:  By my count, this is the third or fourth law that Governor Messinger Dayton had to sign to know what it’d do.

To:  Representatives Paulsen, Bachmann and Kline
From:  Mitch Berg, “Extremist”
Re: 

Representatives,

Who do you plan on voting for to replace Eric Cantor for Majority Leader? 

It’s a fairly simple question – but one that’ll tell us, the voters, a lot about where you stand on the future of the GOP majority. 

My sentiments should be obvious; I say vote for Raoul Labrador.  Put a serious conservative in the office.  While there is a place and time to play nice with the Dems, and make political compromises that need to be made, the time to do that playing and making is not right out of the gate.

The GOP needs to be an alternative to the Democrat party – not an extension of it. 

I’d appreciate, personally, a vote for Labrador – but I’m not in any of your districts, so you needn’t concern yourself with my opinion.

But you should tell your constituents, and Minnesota republicans, where you stand on the future leadership of the House conference. 

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Hey you, watching this news channel.  That’s not your picture, is it?  They’re not saying Your name or discussing Your Facebook video, are they?   They’re ignoring you.   Acting like you don’t matter. Not giving you the respect you deserve.   They’re like those snotty girls at school who sneer at you when you’re just trying to be nice.  Or those jocks shoving you in the hallway.

It doesn’t have to be like this.  You can get noticed.   You can get Even.  We will give you a million dollars of free publicity for every one of them you shoot at school.  It’d be easy.  It’d be Satisfying.

The more you shoot, the brighter your star will shine.  We can make you Somebody.   We can make you Famous.  We’re CNN.  We make the news.”

When a person already is hearing voices, and then the media gives a 24-7 assist to the Devil on the Left Shoulder, well, I’m no psychiatrist but I gotta wonder . . . .

Joe Doakes

I’m not going to say that the news industry knows and banks on the fact that creating copycat murderers is like storing seed corn for them.

But it would make sense, if you were deeply cynical and worried about your own survival, wouldn’t it?

In regard to Terry Gross’ interview with Hillary Clinton last week – in which the eternally-overrated Gross spent ten minutes badgering Clinton about the “evolution” in her views on same-sex marriage – I’m of two minds, depending on who you are:

If You’re a Liberal:  Gross showed Hillary! up as the hypocrite she is.  Clearly Elizabeth Warren is the only person fit to run for President in 2016.  To accept any less would be to short-sell this nation. 

If You’re a Smart Person:  This piece in The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway sums up nicely the things – not by any means good things – that Gross’ badgering says about modern “progressivism”. 

She badgered Clinton for an answer that Gross was tacitly demanding – self-abnegation over her history on the issue – that Clinton is too smart to give. 

Gross pretended that all of American society outside the NPR-infused ultra-left hadn’t largely changed their minds on the issue in a blazingly short time. 

Gross was also engaging in the ritual that is emerging on the left, the Orwellian need for all “progressives” to show that they were exhibiting PC correct-think on every issue from the very beginning. 

And worst?  Gross is showing how very unskeptical and unenquiring her breed of “journalist” is when revealed dogma is involved. 

Now, I know the popular view among our deep thinkers in the media is that recognizing [the definition of marriage as being an institution where one or more man and one or more woman raised children has been remarkably consistent across societies, systems, religions and eras througout human history] should probably be a capital offense. But to paraphrase and quote something I wrote in “The Rise of the Same-Sex Marriage Dissidents,” marriage is historically understood as being based on the reality that all humans have complete biological systems in their body save one. That one for which we all have only half is the reproductive system — the means by which we propagate the species. Humans have all sorts of relationships but marriage was about sexual complementarity for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with bigotry, obviously.

Now if one wants to change marriage laws to reflect something else, that’s obviously something that one can aim to do. We’ve seen the rapid, frequently unthinking embrace of that change in recent years, described one year ago in the humanist and libertarian magazine Spiked as “a case study in conformism” that should terrify “anyone who values diversity of thought and tolerance of dissent.”

Here in Minnesota, the main persuasive approach of the same-sex marriage crowd (“if you don’t support it without stint or question, you’re a bigot”) was the sort of thing that gave Orwell indigestion seventy years ago. 

I do urge you to read the whole thing.

Gun grabbers like to point to Australia as the standard-bearer of “gun safety”.

As with all gun-grabber truisms – distrust, verify, and pretty much invariably distrust some more. Pretty much everyone in Oz that wants a gun can get one…

…provided they’re a criminal.

Read the while thing.

Rand Paul, speaking in Iowa, nailed a few key points the GOP needs to remember, nationally and here in Minnesota:

“There are people who say we need to be more moderate,” he said. “I couldn’t disagree more.”

“I think the core of our message: we can be even more bold,” he added. “When Ronald Reagan won a landslide, he ran unabashedly … that’s what we need … It isn’t about being tepid.”

It’s “moderation” – and its idiot cousin, compromise with Big Left – that have left the nation in the mess it’s in.

The American people – the ones that can be reached, anyway – know this, whether they can state it in as many words or not.

Go conservative/libertarian, or go home.

Michael Bloomberg holds a pro-gun-grab march over the Brooklyn Bridge, which even NPR referred to as “a march paid for by Michael Bloomberg”…

…as nearby in Brooklyn a man carves up three others with a machete.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 

Milton Berle teamed up with Spike Jones and the City Slickers to release “Leave the Dishes In The Sink, Ma” in 1944.

The lyrics provide a glimpse of life for ordinary Americans in the war years.  First, it’s a big deal that our kid is coming home from the war alive, as a Sergeant no less.  Cause to celebrate.

Second, we’ll invite all the neighbors to the party; but what to feed them?  There’s baloney, cheese, pickles in the icebox, and cider in the keg in the cellar.  What, that’s the best you can do, that’s your version of killing the fatted calf?  Well, yeah, in those days, it was.

It was an entirely different world, barely imaginable to people living in America today.

And still, that life that to us is austere is unquestionably better than the life of most of the people around the globe.  The water was safe to drink, easily had.  There was food.  Roof over their heads.  Those who wish to remake America in the image of the rest of the globe, ponder that.

Joe Doakes

The presumption on the part of so much of the Big Left that America would be a great experiment, if it were only socialist, is Obama’s most toxic legacy.

Here’s the website for the Honour/Housley ticket.

Amy Alkon is the Advice Goddess.  Her latest book is “Good Manners for Nice People who Somtimes Say F*ck“

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  I’ll talking with GOP gubernatoriial candidate Scott Honour, and with Amy Alkon, author of “Good Manners for Nice Poeple Who Sometimes Say F*ck”‘
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow, Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. 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!

Tomorrow on the Northern Alliance, I’ll be talking with:

• MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Honour
• Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, on her new book Good Manners for People Who Sometimes Say F**k.  And yes, I will be using my radio training to the hilt tomorrow. 

Hope you can tune in from 1-3PM on AM1280!

It’s been about a decade now since the “Drone” – the unmanned aircraft remotely-controlled by a human – promised to revolutionize warfare. 

It was a solid decade before that that the “precision-guided weapon” became the star of the first Gulf War.

And it was a decade and a half earlier that the “Cruise Missile” became first the great destabilizor of the endless series of nuclear arms talks, and then one of the hammers with which Ronald Reagan beat the Soviet Union on the anvil of unbending socialist economic stagnation.

But all three of these currents got their bloody start seventy years ago today, with the first “Buzz Bomb” attack on London.

Hitler and the German bureaucracy were famous for squandering immense effort on weapons, strategies and programs that served no useful purpose but to indulge the vendettas of one Nazi leader or another.  As the German army was running short of tanks on the Eastern Front, Hitler was devoting immense engineering effort to building a rocket to attack New York.  As the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front scraped to supply itself with food and ammunition, railroads were forced to reserve masses of rolling stock to transport people to and among concentration camps. 

And as the tide turned against the German military on land, sea and air – culminating in the D-Day invasions 70 years ago last Friday – Hitler squandered a king’s ransom on weapons designed to terrorize enemy civilians.

70 years ago today the first “V-1” “Buzz Bomb” struck London.

A V1, captured at the end of the war.

The Vergeltungswaffe 1 – or “Reprisal Weapon 1” – was the world’s first operational “Cruise Missile” – basically an unmanned aircraft whose sole mission was to fly a preset distance, crash into the ground, and detonate the 1,800 pounds explosives it carried.  It was nicknamed the “Buzz Bomb” by the Allies due to its pulse-jet engine, which burned fuel in a series of bursts rather than in a continuous stream like a modern jet engine, causing the weapon in flight to sound like a very long, immensely loud, dry fart in flight.   The crude jet drove the weapon at around 400 mph – faster than all but the very fastest Allied fighters, the Mustang, Spitfire, Tempest and Mosquito.

V1 in flight

It was a crude weapon.  It wasn’t “guided”, per se – it flew in the direction in which it was launched, from large launch ramps in Holland.  They were stabilized – they had a reasonable chance of flying in a more or less straight direction – and carried a crude timer powered by a propellor which, after a designated number of spins, would send the plane into a power-drive straight into the ground; on contact, the detonator would explode the bomb.  

A V1 on a launch ramp. This was the “guidance system”.

It was crude, not really capable of “hitting a target” so much as “blowing up somewhere in a large area”. 

And London (which was really the only target the bombs were aimed at until the Allied advances during autumn put the launch sites out of range, when they switched to the Allies’ main supply port at Antwerp, Belgium) was a very big target.

The reactions in London have been toned down by the historians – but the attacks caused the RAF and USAAF to redeploy a huge number of anti-aircraft guns and their fastest fighter planes – the P51 Mustangs, Supermarine Spitfire XVs, De Havilland Mosquitos and especially Hawker Tempests that were so direly needed to maintain air supremacy over the continent.   Countering V-1s was the first job of Britain’s first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor.   This was among the most dangerous jobs in the RAF during this last year of the war; shooting a buzz bomb could set off an explosion that’d take out both planes.  Many pilots preferred to “tip” the V1s – using their wings to flip the buzz bombs’ wings, sending them either off-course or into the ground.  The campaign against the buzz bombs killed 300 Allied airmen.  

A Spitfire “tipping” a V1 in flight. Bear in mind, both planes are moving at 400-450 miles per hour.

The countermeasures – a huge ring of anti-aircraft guns, and squadrons of patroling fighters – killed nearly 75% of the incoming cruise missiles. 

Of 10,000 V1s fired at London, about 2,400 got through. 

Saint Paul’s Cathedral, with a V1 diving to impact in the background.

And while it was nowhere near as deadly as the Blitz of 1940 – the months of firebombing that killed 92,000 Britons (at a cost of 3,000 aircraft and over 7,000 German aircrew), the V-1 campaign destroyed almost the same number of structures, killed 22,000 (mostly in and around London), and incurred no direct German casualties. It was one of the most cost-effective terror campaigns in history.

While the weapons were crude, and the goal was futile, in another sense the first explosion of the first Buzz Bomb 70 years ago today was the first explosion of the 21st Century way of making war.

SCENE:  In the office of “Governor” Mark Dayton, at the Minnesota State Capital.  Carrie LUCKING, Executive Director of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, is sitting at a large, mahogany desk.  She is leaning back, feet up on the desk, looking idly upward at the paintings and carvings that decorate the ornate office in the classical romanesque structure. 

Across from her is a larger, more ornate mahogany desk.  The nameplate says “Alida Messinger”; it shows signs of being only intermittently occupied. 

A knock is heard on a door leading to a small closet (off right).  LUCKING barely stirs. 

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR MARK DAYTON (dimly heard through door):  Can I go to the bathroom?

LUCKING:  Go.

(DAYTON opens closet door, walked quickly, shoulders hunched through the door to the left, as Hannah UNDERLING, a staff assistant, walks in)

UNDERLING:  Er, Miss Lucking?  House Minority Leader Daudt is calling for hearings on MNSure.

LUCKING:  Put out a press release calling him “extreme”.

(UNDERLING makes a note). 

That’ll be all. 

(UNDERLING leaves). 

(Time passes.  LUCKING indolently pecks a message into her cell phone, until T. Giles HUMID, a highly trained puppeteer and member of the Governor’s staff, enters the room).

HUMID:  Er, Carrie…

(LUCKING clears her throat)

HUMID:  …er, Miss Lucking?  A group of of Saint Paul school parents are demanding better results from the public schools for their children.

LUCKING (staring idly at the ceiling, twisting her hair):  Put out a call to Keri Miller saying they’re…extreme. 

(HUMID takes a  note, leaves the room).

(There is a knock on the door).

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR DAYTON (voice muffled outside the door):  Can I come in?

LUCKING (Bored):  Yes. 

(DAYTON walks past, stops at LUCKING’s desk)

DAYTON:  Say, uh…

LUCKING:  I’m busy.

DAYTON:  Ok.  (He walks through the closet door again)

(LUCKING, bored, starts folding an origami swan.  It quickly starts resembling a badly-formed paper airplane.  She wads it up and throws it in a trash can that is overflowing with wadded-up pieces of paper)

(Tina FLINT-SMITH, the Governor’s chief of staff and Lieutenant-Governor candidate, enters the room)

FLINT-SMITH:  Carrie, I’m going to be out at a town hall meeting in Cambridge, and I need a term to use to refer to the GOP’s criticism of our budget.

LUCKING:  I’d run with “extreme”.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  Do we use that a lot?

LUCKING:  No.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  (Leaves the room). 

(More idle time).

(Finally, UNDERLING enters).

UNDERLING:  Ms. Lucking, I got a request from some DFLers from Greater Minnesota.  They need some talking points during upcoming debates.

LUCKING (sounding bored):  DFLers from where?

UNDERLING:  Um, Greater Minnesota?  (LUCKING stares, not compreheding.)  The part outside the Twin Cities Metro.

LUCKING:  Huh.

UNDERLING:  They want to know – what do we call Sheila Kihne?

LUCKING:  Er…hm.  Let me think.  I’d say “too extreme!”

UNDERLING: OK.  How about Jennifer Loon?  The rep whom Kihne is primarying? 

LUCKING:  I think we should call her…too extreme!

UNDERLING (sotto voce while writing): …too extreme.  OK – how about Dave Senjem, from Rochester, the leader of the “moderate” faction of the GOP in the House?

LUCKING (absent-mindedly twirling a piece of thread):  Oh, he’s “too extreme”. 

UNDERLING:  Hmm.  OK.  How about Julie Rosen?   Republicans are constantly complaining she’s too moderate.  What is the message about here?

LUCKING (staring into space):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  And how about Tom Bakk.

LUCKING (visibly bored):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  But he’s actually the DFL’s Senate Majority Leader.

LUCKING:  Oh.

(Ryan WINKLER walks in)

WINKLER: Hey, I was talking with Colin Peterson. He’s getting a run for his money from Torrey Westrom. How’s about we call him “shortsighted”?

UNDERLING: Really?

WINKLER: What?  You’re gonna say that’s racist, too? 

UNDERLING:  You don’t know…?

WINKLER:  What?  He’s a black lawyer, too? 

UNDERLING:  He’s blind. 

WINKLER:  I don’t get it. 

LUCKING:  He’s too extreme.

UNDERLING:  Right…

LUCKING:  But we must counter him as well.  (Turns toward DAYTON’s closet)  Hey!   Find some Ray Charles glasses and a long white cane!

(Silence from behind DAYTON’s door)

LUCKING:  HEY!

DAYTON:  Ok. 

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A guy in Israel studied male-female combat injuries in the Israeli Army and announces the Emperor has no clothes!

Plainly, he’s a hateful sexist. He’ll be purged, soon.

Equally plainly, the Rules of War need to be changed so women can play, too.

Joe Doakes

Victory for the agenda is the only victory some care about.

What if The Onion did a parody of Buzzfeed, the “news” site that is the harbinger of the end of the Western intellect? 

Why, it’d be a lot more fun, and less an insult to your intelligence to boot!

In which we learn from our “President” that gun violence (which has dropped by half in the past twenty years) “has never been worse”, but that the world “has never been less violent” (as the Middle East spirals toward a general conflagration). 

Even Jimmy Carter knew better than to look at a bowl full of crap and call it organic sherbet.

But Jimmy Carter was targeting an electorate that was paying attention.  Obama never has.

Everytown USA – one of Michael Bloomberg’s astroturf gun-grabber groups – circulated a map claiming that there had been 74 school shootings substantially similar to Newtown since the Sandy Hook shooting.

But what have we told you about anti-gun groups?

Distrust but verify.  Then, almost inevitably, resume distrusting (emphasis added):

The news outlet circulated the graphical map, which came from the group Everytown for Gun Safety, after a shooting that occurred Tuesday at a high school in Oregon which left two dead, including the 15 year-old gunman.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, headlined their graphic “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook,” suggesting that the shootings it listed had a link of some kind to Sandy Hook — in which Adam Lanza killed 26 people at an elementary school.

CNN and various other media outlets used the graphic in news segments.

Of course they did.

But…

“So on Wednesday, CNN took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included,” reads CNN’s report.

It acknowledged that many of the shootings listed by Everytown did not fit the profile of a Sandy Hook-type shooting, in which the attacks are seemingly random.

Instead, CNN said, “some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.” (RELATED: School Shooting Claims Debunked)

“CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon – a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school,” said CNN.

The number and severity of school shootings has actually dropped, along with the overall murder rate, over the past 20 years.  And kids are vastly less likely to be shot in school than in, say, a Chicago neighborhood.

It’s two days until the opening of the “Green Line” – and the Met Council’s toy choo choo has already been involved in four accidents.  That’s far ahead of the pace of the Ventura Trolley.

I’ve driven down University alongside the trains; it’s more than a little bit disconcerting.  And, if you’re not really really diligent about checking your vehicle’s blind spots, potentially deadly.

But what could possibly make it worse?  They’re going to turn opening night into a pub crawl.

That’s right – like Uni doesn’t have enough drunks patrolling it on a Saturday night anyway…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s not strictly speaking a gun-rights case.  But the discussion of the 21-foot rule might be useful to a CCW permittee who finds herself explaining why she shot a person holding a knife, standing a little distance away from her.

The defendant in this case argued with apartment security, went to her car, retrieved a knife, then returned to threaten security with the knife.  The prosecution called the investigating detective, who testified:

“Over defense objection, Detective Ratajczyk testified regarding the continuum of force; the lowest level of force being the presence of a person in uniform, and the level of force then moves from verbal, to physical, to deadly force.  According to Detective Ratajczyk, force in response to a threat is “met with the same force plus one.”  Detective Ratajczyk also testified that he believed a knife is a dangerous weapon, particularly if the knife is within 21 feet of an officer because a distance of 21 feet is the minimum distance an officer with a holstered weapon needs to react to a threat from a knife . . . Even if we were to conclude that the challenged testimony was inadmissible, appellant cannot establish prejudice because there is no reasonable possibility that the verdict would have been different had the challenged testimony not been admitted.  See Post, 512 N.W.2d at 102.  The record reflects that the evidence supporting appellant’s guilt was overwhelming.”

The Court didn’t actually rule on whether the 21-foot rule was valid.  But the court didn’t toss it out, either.  Keep this case in your pocket for the next time somebody claims a knife isn’t a reason to use deadly force.

Joe Doakes

I would love to see the weasel assistant DA who tries to state with a straight face that a knife isn’t a deadly weapon.

Only on Planet Law.

For the fourth straight month, Minnesota’s revenues came in below forecast – and the rate of the shortfalls is accelerating.  That is according to Minnesota Management and Budget, which is nominally non-partisan (but whose leadership depends on Mark Dayton for their employment, and whose rank and file work for AFSCME). 

Exactly as fiscal conservatives said they would.

Over the past four months, the shortfalls add up to over $200 million dollars – enough for a couple of Senate Office Buildings (hat tip: Ben Kruse). 

So what does this mean? 

Forward To The Past!:  Remember 2010?  When the DFL/Media harped on the “six billion dollar deficit” that two years of DFL control of the legislature had left us? 

The deficit that two years of GOP control in the Legislature erased and converted – in the year after the DFL took control, when GOP policies were finally taking effect – to over a billion in surpluses? 

The “D” word is back.  Oh, not that the Strib is going to make anything of it, not yet – not until there are Republicans to blame – but this adds new impetus to the predictions that the state budget – which the GOP dragged out of six billion dollars worth of deficit in 2011-2012 – is heading back to deficit in the budget’s off-year. 

So what does this mean?

Remember that $1.1 billion surplus that the DFL inherited from two years of GOP control?

Well, memories are all we have. If revenues keep falling at this rate, and the shorftall keeps growing at the rate it’s been accelerating this past few months, we’re going to be at over a billion dollars in deficits by the end of this year. 

And the worse news? 

Underperforming:  The budget forecasts were based on the projections of economic activity using the activity of the years of GOP control as a baseline, with growth predictions factored in.

The growth isn’t happening as predicted. 

So for all the DFL/Media’s happy talk about Minnesota’s economy, the MInnesota economy is like a Summit Avenue mansion; the main floor, where the Fortune 500 folks like Target, Best Buy, Ecolab, 3M and the like hang out looks just great – but the foundation is rotting away.