There was a time when I could say every kid knew who fought who in World War II; Germany, Japan and Italy on one side, the US, UK, USSR and France on the other.

I’m not sure a lot of people today could get the answer right.

But even people who know the larger story of World War 2 miss that it was called a “World” war for a reason, and not just because it was fought all over the world.   It involved a record total of nations; 11 fought with the Axis (from Germany and Japan down to Croatia); there were 46 nations on the Allied side.

And for most of the nations, the war never extended beyond their own borders.  They got into the war for a variety of reasons – political alliances (the entire British Commonwealth), being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the rest of Europe), or wanting to be recognized in the big leagues (most of South America).

It was probably the latter that brought Brazil into the war on the side of the Allies in 1942.  In exchange for providing air bases on the South Atlantic to patrol against U-boats, the US gave some key preferences to Brazilian iron exports.  This cooperation gradually moved from trade and bases to full military cooperation, and eventually joining in the war effort.  Brazil’s navy – heavily equipped and trained by the US – joined in the Battle of the Atlantic, escorting convoys about the Caribbean and South Atlantic.

And the Brazilian Army assembled an infantry division (copied from the US Army’s organization) and sent it to Italy, where it fought in that nearly-forgotten campaign.

And seventy years ago today, it  commissioned its first fighter squadron for overseas service.

The squadron – in Portuguese, the “First Fighter Group”, or 1º Grupo de Aviação de Caça – spent its first few months defending the Panama Canal Zone, before transitioning to the US to learn to fly the legendary P-47 Thunderbolt. 

An early-model P-47D, in Brazilian colors. The plane – called the “Jug” for its stubby, capacious fuselage design – was famous for its ruggedness and ability to take damage. It excelled as a ground-attack plane in Italy and, especially, in the Allied campaign in western Europe.

They were soon in action in Italy – not terribly far from the “Tuskeegee Airmen”, as luck would have it – and while neither they nor their counterparts in the Brazilian Army contingent were in the thick of the war in Italy, they rang up an impressive record.

A Brazilian “Jug” on the ground in Italy.

The Brazilians’ commanders at the Allied XXII Air Force – responsible for all ground-attack aviation in Italy – accounted for the Brazilians’ accomplishments in their six months in front-line service, and reckoned that the Brazilians, who were about 5% of the planes and flew 5% of the missions, destroyed…:

• 85% of the ammunition blown up by the XXII’d ATAF
• Torched 36% of the fuel destroyed
• Toppled 28% of the bridges destroyed, and 19% of those damaged
• knocked out 15% of the motor vehicles and 10% of horse-drawn vehicles destroyed in those six months. 

And Brazil wasn’t the only country to send troops to Europe. 

More on that next month.

Two’s company; three’s potentially legal

A narrow national majority favors same-sex marriage.  Will that majority favor a plurality?

When it comes to debating social issues, the  “slippery slope” argument often holds the least amount of traction.  As Minnesota was racked by contentious debate surrounding last year’s marriage amendment, one of the litany of debate volleys was that opening the door to same-sex marriage could inevitability lead to polygamy.  Same-sex marriage supporters dismissed the notion, suggesting the argument was tangential at best, and a “scare tactic” at worst.

Boo:

Advocates for so-called plural marriages are applauding a ruling by a U.S. District Court judge that struck down key segments of Utah’s anti-polygamy law, saying they violated constitutional rights to privacy and religious freedom.

In a 91-page decision issued Friday, Judge Clark Waddoups effectively decriminalized polygamy in Utah, ruling that a central phrase in the state’s law forbidding cohabitation with another person violated the 1st and 14th amendments.

In all fairness, the lawsuit, brought about by the stars of the TLC reality show “Sister Wives”, depicting a Utah Mormon family with one legal wife and three “wives” who live with them, was more over striking down language that prevented religious cohabitation than actually allowing polygamy.  Kody Brown, the “star” of “Sister Wives” remains only legally married to one woman.  But proponents and opponents of polygamy alike agree that the ruling has opened the door to potentially allowing multiple partners in a marriage.

The debate reached the pages of the New York Times, and in true Gray Lady fashion, presented four arguments in favor of what is now being called “plural marriage” with only two dissenting points of view.  To ape T.S. Eliot, this is how social convention dies, not with a bang, but with a series of op-eds.

If the contours of the New York Times‘ debate on polygamy looked familiar, they should – because they neatly conform to the same lines of argument that have defined the same-sex marriage debate.  Laws against polygamy are discrimination.  Plural marriage advocates deserve respect and dignity.  Plural marriage makes us freer as a society.  Heck, even the arguments against “scare tactics” make a triumphant return.  Opponents can sight studies showing the negative effects of polygamy on women and children, but essentially are reduced to arguing that the move represents a further tumble down that ill-defined “slippery slope.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the world of our media “elites”, the biggest problem facing our union is that we aren’t all pulling in the same (i.e. the Democrats’) direction.

Is it a problem – the idea that our democracy be accountable to the fact that we don’t all agree on the best way forward?  That everyone hasn’t gotten behind the media “elites'” pet “socialist-lite” dream, like the big episode of “West Wing” they seem to believe our civic life is?

I’m not sold.

But one think I am sold on is that most of the media’s proposed solutions to this “problem” are worse than the problem they’d solve.

We had a curiously synchonous pair of cases in point last week, when two liberal commetators – Mark Shields and Dana Milbank – called for a return of the draft.

Blind As A Liberal:  Let’s dispense with Shields first.

He notes the nobility of service – and how usual it used to be to find the children of the ruling elites serving in the military:

Americans are disconnected from each other and nowhere is this disconnect more alarming and more obvious than between those in the U.S. military and their civilian contemporaries. In spite of all the “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers on SUVs and the unvarying mantra of how “proud” all our public officials, irrespective of party, are of “our brave men and women in uniform,” the American upper class is happy to have all fighting and, yes, all dying done not by its own, precious children but instead by the sons and daughters of waitresses, secretaries and firefighters…Lyndon Johnson was the last president to have a son — or in his case, two sons-in-law — serve, both in wartime. Franklin Roosevelt had four sons. All went to war. Elliott Roosevelt enlisted in the Army Air Corps and flew 300 combat missions. Jimmy Roosevelt joined the Marine Corps, and in combat in the Pacific, earned both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s bravery saving the lives of crew members when under heavy enemy fire was rewarded with a Silver Star. And Navy Lt. John Roosevelt earned a Bronze Star during World War II.

All very true.

Of course, in 2008 the children of both of the candidates on one ticket were serving in the military.   John McCain and Sarah Palin both had children on active duty.  I don’t recall Shields going especially out of his way to note that particular virtue about either of them during that race.   

It’s a selective virtue, I guess…

Motivation:  Of course, the draft is the last thing the military wants – because outside of a few very narrowly-defined circumstances, draftee militaries aren’t as effective as volunteer militaries.

Those circumstances, of course, are “when your homeland is in immediate, grave peril”.  History is full of examples of draftee militaries that fought brilliantly in defending their homes; Israel’s “national service” military, sure but also the USSR (albeit at gruesome cost), even the Germans, who held off the Allied onslaught much longer than might have been.  The world is also full of draftee militaries that present their would-be opponents with harsh deterrents to aggression; Switzerland, South Korea, Finland, even Cold (heh) War-era Norway.   Because while not everyone intrinsicaly wants to be a soldier, pretty much nobody wants their home to be conquered by the Nazis, the North Koreans, the Soviets or the Syrians.

History also presents us examples of draftee armies that grossly underperformed outside those circumstances; it’s a simple fact of human nature that soldiers who don’t volunteer to fight, and have no real skin in the game fight-wise, are a lot mess motivated to risk life and limb than people who signed up for the job.   We’ve talked about this in the past.

So the military – least of all the Army – wants nothing to do with a draft.

Other Motivations:  But it’s not about fighting wars for the likes of Milbank.  To him (and Fields, whose commentary is similar to Milbank’s; too similar), it’s about the good ol’ days:

As I make my rounds each day in the capital, chronicling our leaders’ plentiful foibles, failings, screw-ups, inanities, outrages and overall dysfunction, I’m often asked if there’s anything that could clean up the mess.

Anyone who asks Dana Milbank for solutions to this nation’s problems should have their drivers’ license revoked.  But I digress.

My usual answer is a shrug and an admission that there’s no silver bullet. There are many possibilities — campaign spending limits, term limits, nonpartisan primaries, nonpartisan redistricting, a third party — but most aren’t politically or legally feasible, might not make much of a difference or, as with Harry Reid’s rewriting of Senate rules, have the potential to make things even worse.

But one change, over time, could reverse the problems that have built up over the past few decades: We should mandate military service for all Americans, men and women alike, when they turn 18. The idea is radical, unlikely and impractical — but it just might work.

And why is that?

A Congressional Quarterly count of the current Congress finds that just 86 of the 435 members of the House are veterans, as are only 17 of 100 senators, which puts the overall rate at 19 percent. This is the lowest percentage of veterans in Congress since World War II, down from a high of 77 percent in 1977-78, according to the American Legion.

There might be a point in there.  But after a brief digression, we’ll see that it’s not Milbank’s.

…And Statistics:  Just as a brief aside, here’s one of the best illustrations of an element of basic logic that liberals – even “elites” like Milbank – routinely bastardize:

With that in m ind, Milbank continues (with emphasis added by yours truly):

It’s no coincidence that this same period has seen the gradual collapse of our ability to govern ourselves: a loss of control over the nation’s debt, legislative stalemate and a disabling partisanship. It’s no coincidence, either, that Americans’ approval of Congress has dropped to just 9 percent, the lowest since Gallup began asking the question 39 years ago.

If it’s a logical war Milbank wants to fight, he should go to LegalZoom and pick up some “Articles of Surrender” – because both of those cases are dictionary definitions of “coincidence”.

The World War 2 generation in Congress were fairly similar across parties, not because most of them had served in the military, but because they had survived two existential threats to America and its way of life; the war and the Depression.  They had faced down the Dust Bowl, the Nazis and the Japanese – all before age 30.  They didn’t serve in the military to learn leadership; they served because the country, and our civilization, was under mortal threat.

After beating existential threats, civil debate is a piker.

Put another way; if military service guarantees smooth, civil government, the Pentagon bureaucracy should have no strident factionalism, and high productivity.   Right?

Changing Times:  Today, we face no external, existential, human threat.  Our greatest enemy is ourselves – and not in a way that you can (or at least should) sic the military on.  The military threats we have are overseas, small, asymmetric, and best dealt with by people who want the job; the volunteers we currently have.

If you create an immense conscript military where there is no threat, all you do is turn the military into a social program.

Which is, of course, what Milbank and Shields are after, although they don’t say it in as many words.  In their world, the military would be less a vehicle for fighting wars, and more a tool for social engineering; a giant make-work and indoctrination program.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The fact that she was the only person who died in the crash is not the least bit suspicious, there’s nothing to see here, move along, you racist haters.

Joe Doakes

Even if you cordially detest conspiracy theory (as I do), the Obama Administration is a dog’s breakfast of head-shaking fun.

I went to a little college in the middle of nowhere. I’ve written about it a time or two; it nearly followed a hundred other small rural colleges to extinction in the eighties, but bounced back in a huge way (and, in this environment where people are starting to take the higher ed bubble seriously, provides an excellent value for the educational dollar, especially for science majors, nursing majors, pre-meds (!), teachers and a fewer other areas.  Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you, alumni office!).  Back then, it was known for a top-flight nursing program, athletic programs that fought waaaay above their weight, and a concert choir that was pretty internationally famous. 

But I come today not so much to praise Jamestown college The University of Jamestown, but to razz it.

(And not for changing its name to University of Jamestown, although I could).

Among Jamestown’s salient virtues – it never had fraternities. No vapid insipid Greek blar-di-blar ever poked its nose onto the campus. We used frat boys for firewood at Jamestown College.

What the college had were dorms. Three of them

Up on the far north end of campus (at that time – the campus has grown as the student population has doubled), New Hall dated from the seventies; it was basically an apartment building for married students (and, sometimes, groups of 3-4 upperclassmen who got along really well). 

Also on the north side of campus, Kroeze Hall (pronounced “Cruise-y”) was from the sixties: it was full of modern amenities, like shower stalls, telephone jacks, water pressure.

And then there was Watson Hall.

Built in 1930 on the south side of the campus, on the edge of the hill overlooking Jamestown, it was old, and it showed. The rooms were…rooms. That’s it. 14 feet by 10 feet. Two beds – twin-size.  Two closets, big enough to hold just barely more than the pre-grunge wardrobe I had. Two desks. In-room phone not an option even if you DID want to pay for it (and I did not); there was one phone per floor. Two shower heads and three toilets per floor, housing 40 or so guys (or gals, after 1982 when the third, top floor was ceded to the women, not so much to cut down on the partying as make it less violent). And if you flushed while someone was in the shower, you yelled “SHOWER” at the top of your lungs, because with the cold water flushing the toilet, anyone in the shower had to get clear before getting scalded. It was all on the same run of pipes.

Rodents were not strangers. Hot and stuffy in warm weather, its ancient steam heat system was incapable of subtlety, either chilling the residents or clankily steaming them into sweaty indolence.

But there was a chummy esprit de dorm about the place. People either stayed in Kroeze (or tried Watson and moved across campus at the first opening), or stayed in Watson their whole time at JC. The resident assistants were generally low-key and laissez-faire about rules; if you had a few beers or a girl in your room after hours (it was a dry, nominally-Presbyterian campus – no alcohol allowed, and the genders were supposed to get off each other’s floors by 11pm, or 1am on weekends), as long as you didn’t make a ruckus, it wasn’t a federal case.

The inmates hated and loved the old building. It’s petty hardships gave the locals a crude cameraderie. It was Jamestown’s Animal Dorm.

I don’t miss much about college – but i do get a little nostalgic over that old dorm.

But as the man said, everything dies, that’s a fact:

Christmas break will see the demolition of the building’s west annex, and construction will begin on a 3,100-square foot addition to the west side of the building.”Our plan is to work on the addition while the University is in session and work in the main building over the summer,” says Tom Heck, Vice President for Planning and Administration [and my Econ teacher]

The addition will include the building’s new main entrance, an elevator, a Resident Director’s office, new restrooms and shower rooms for each floor, and expanded lounges with kitchenettes on the second and third floors.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Other work will include aesthetic improvements in the hallways, new electrical lines and upgraded lighting, and installation of air conditioning and a sprinkler system. Work will be completed in time for the start of the 2014-15 academic year.

Have these people no respect for tradition?

Hope all you epicurean punks learn to appreciate what you’re missing!

Last fall, Bill Glahn pondered the “journalistic ethics” of Minnesota Public Radio News taking underwriting money from one of the government bodies it’s supposed to be scrutinizing – in this case, MNSure’s sponsorship of Keri Miller’s “Daily Current” show:

The host’s interruptions of the token conservative are not just to challenge facts or opinion.  On two occasions, MPR’s Miller interrupts Republican Golnik to defend Democrat Governor Dayton—on the Vikings Stadium [30:22] and on MPR News’ sponsor MNsure.

Nobody’s mistaken Keri Miller for a non-biased journalist in 25 years; she’s about as balanced as Bill O’Reilly. 

But Glahn notes that, yes, MNSure – an agency of the government of the state of Minnesota – sponsors MPR News. 

So now, we get the news that the directors of MNSure and Minnesota’s Medicaid director took a vacation to Costa Rica together (as the MNSure site was debuting to terrible reviews). 

Now, is there a conflict of interest, here?  Knowing that if MNSure actually does crater, its victims clients will likely get thrown into Medicaid?   I don’t know – yet.  But I’ll find out. 

If there were a problem (and MPR’s coverage so far seems to tell us “nothing to see here, move along, people“), would MPR be the one to tell us? 

Along with their acceptance of funding from the Joyce Foundation – the major funder of anti-gun-rights organizations in the US – specifically to provide gun-related content (and biased, slanted anti-gun content at that), I have to ask; when do people who care about actual journalism start asking questions about these financial entanglements?

How soon people forget…

…well, no.  How soon the DFL and its stenographers in the mainstream Minnesota media try to make them forget. 

The GOP-majority legislature in 2011 and 2012 bounced the state back from a (let’s take the Democrat-controlled bureaucracy at its word) $6 Billion-and-change deficit to an $800 million surplus, without raising taxes.  Had they followed the Tea Party freshmens’ advice, and held spending at 2010 levels, it would have likely been more like $2 Billion – but that’s water under the bridge for now.  They also tried to use some of that money to pay back the “school budget shift” – a DFL-designed accounting gimmick that operated entirely as a chanting point for the DFL – but Governor Dayton Messinger vetoed it to hold it out there as an election-year rhetorical cudgel. 

But it’s another year.  And a DFL controlled legislature.

And after increasing taxes by two billion dollars – many of which haven’t kicked in yet – the DFL is taking full credit for a “Billion dollar surplus”. 

Let’s make sure we’re clear on the compare-and-contrast, here:

• The GOP, without raising taxes, moved moved the revenue needle seven billion dollars (although two billion got eaten up by additional spending the DFL demanded via Governor Dayton Messinger. 
• The DFL, in one year, took an additional two billion dollars out of the productive economy and handed it to government – leaving us with a grand total of $200 million in additional surplus.   And remember – the worst of the DFL’s taxes haven’t even started yet. 

That of course begs a question – concluding that a surplus is a good thing.  It’s not; it’s money taken out of the productive economy.  That billion dollars is money the State of Minnesota thinks it deserves more than you – the person who actually earned it. 

The DFL is going to do its best to obscure that – because for all of their endzone-happy-dancing, it’s really not all that good.

“I’m Already NoH9”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

People are claiming the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral was a fake because “. . . the man communicated nothing with his hand and arm movements.”

Maybe he accurately interpreted Barak Obama’s speech. The man basically said nothing so the interpreter said nothing.

The real complaint shouldn’t be with the meaningless interpreter, but with the content-free speakers.

Joe Doakes

Silly me.  I thought all of those sign language people were waving away nonsensically.

Last year in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting,  Wayne LaPierre of the NRA stated the best solution to school shooting sprees was armed staff – police on school service duty, security guards or teachers with carry permits – on school grounds.

The usual pants-wetting crowd on the left squealed like they’d gotten a knitting needle jammed in their eyes.

The takeaway from last week’s shooting at a school and “gun free zone” in Arapahoe County Colorado, where a committed leftist student critically injured a classmate before killing himself, was this; the incident lasted 80 seconds, because there was an immediate armed response by a school service officer.

The rampage might have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who was working as a school resource officer at the school, [Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson] said…He praised the deputy’s response as “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself, and lauded his response to hearing gunshots. “He went to the thunder,” he said. “He heard the noise of gunshot and, when many would run away from it, he ran toward it to make other people safe.”

That is, of course, the big takeaway from Columbine, from Sandy Hook, and a slew of other episodes; the best cure for a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.

Any other answer merely kills more innocent people.

And while I’m not sure that’s what the likes of Jane Kay, Representatives Heather Martens and Michael Paymar, and Michael Bloomberg want, it’s a simple fact that none of them have really thought about it in terms other than “stick it to the law-abiding schnook” before.

One of the tiny network of astroturf gun-grabber groups that’ve been trying to gut the Second Amendment in Minnesota is “Moms Demand Action”.   They are run by the rather overwrought-sounding Jane Kay.

So far, their main contribution to the anti-human-rights effort has been to make Heather Martens and “Protect” MN sound almost reasonable.  Oh, yeah – and generate Twitter spam for legislators.

Now, the Joyce Foundation has been spending big liberal-plutocrat bucks trying to get Minnesotans (outside of white, upper-middle-class Carlton grads in Crocus Hill and Kenwood) to take them seriously.

And so apparently they have a new PR angle – something to put a jaunty face on what had to be as humiliating a year for Moms Want Action as for all the rest of Minnesota’s anti-rights crowd.

Anyway – new branding!  They rolled it out last week!  Here it is!

From Rob D of GOCRA on Facebook:

When your group name already sounds like an x:rated website, circulating an image of a woman disrobing could be considered a marketing fail.

Right?  Like, do you need a credit card to use their website?

I worry sometimes that the anti-rights movement is floating people like Jane Kay and Heather Martens and groups like Moms Want Action! to lull pro-civil-rights Real Americans into a false sense of intellectual, rhetorical and political superiority.

Whether by design or not, I gotta admit – it’s working.

The media, especially NPR, ran wall-to-wall coverage of the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre over the weekend.

The media paraded bereaved parents before the media, as scholars and journalists and talking heads furrowed their brows and clucked in the way that they’ve become accustomed to clucking about the whole thing.

As a parent, I can relate.  Seeing peoples’ children being murdered is the mother of all gut-checks.  It’s impossible not to feel that overwhelming flood of parental dread, a wave of human compassion, and a twinge “there but for the grace of God…” at stories like that.

But I noticed something absent in any of the mainstream media’s coverage of “gun violence” over the past year-and-almost-a-week; while the media has spent countless hours memorializing the children of Newtown, we’ve seen scarcely a word about the children murdered in Chicago – the crown jewel of American gun control, and the community controlled by the pals of the current administration.

In 2013 – which roughly corresponds to the year since Newtown – there’ve been 395 murders in Chicago.  The toll is remarkable in that it is marginally a little lower than some previous years, but still a mind-numbing carnage.

And of those 395 murders, nine were of children under 12 years old.  And 40 more were of people from 13-17 years old.

Counting everyone?  That’s 16 Sandy Hook classrooms worth of carnage among children over the past year.

But the victims rated not a single day of national garment-rending.  Scarcely an askance mention on National Public Radio.

Why?

Because they had the misfortune to be murdered in a city that is completely strangleheld by Democrats?

Or because none of them look like the children of NPR executives or “Protect” Minnesota leaders?

I was going to write about the case of Army Lt. Colonel Robert Bateman, who’s become a bit of a mini-celebrity on the left for coming out espousing a very draconian raft of gun control laws.

But Joe Doakes beat me to it, and did it with style.

Joe’s piece is below the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the link for the Minnesota Military Appreciation Fund.

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 be talking with Senator Dave Osmek about the DFL’s next round of budget hijinx.  Also SPC Kristopher Francisco, Afgan war vet, talking about the Minnesota Military Appreciation Fund (MMAF).
• 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 new 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!

Some guys grew up fantasizing about the car they wanted, someday.

For others, it was the gun, the girl, the guitar.

I did all of those, naturally (’67 Mustang, HK91, Marisa Tomei, 1959 Les Paul Standard).

But above all?  When I was a kid – and not so much a kid – I used to fantasize about the band I’d have someday.

Usually, the dream focused on some combination of two guitars, keyboards, bass and drums.  Nice and flexible, allows for all sorts of combinations of guitar sounds.  Sorta like Tom Petty and the classic Heartbreakers (here with an added sax player and background singer, which I’d also dig):

Of course, through much of the eighties – and (koff) the nineties, I thought it’d be fun to have something a little bigger, less garage-y, frighteningly tight, and danceable.

Like INXS:

Although that’d mean recruiting someone else to sing. And lead singers are a pain.

At various times, I’ve thought “screw it – I’m gonna go full Stax/Volt”:

And truth be told, that’s where I’m at right now; a band that is something like the classic Asbury Jukes lineup, complete with the horn section.

But then I remember all the crap that goes into keeping all the personalities in even a four piece band together, and I think “screw it; I’ll do a power trio”:

Of course, as always, I’ll stick with “whatever I can find”.

Er, when I start another band…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

City of St. Paul takes responsibility for street plowing the way Obama’s IRS does – proclaim outrage, shuffle people around, make vague promises and hope the issue goes away.

A city taxes residents to perform a few, basic duties: keep the peace, fight fires, provide safe drinking water, treat sewage and plow the streets.  Since I moved here in 1998, streets have been a cruel insult.

Comparing St. Paul to Minneapolis sounds fair – both big cities with huge staff and monster budgets – but a better comparison is Roseville or Falcon Heights – a small city with small staff and small budget whose streets are plowed and sanded, clean and dry, weeks before St. Paul’s streets are done.  If the little town can do it with tiny staff working for peanuts, why can’t giant St. Paul do it with all its union employees and LGA resources?

I suspect Mayor Chris Coleman doesn’t want to discuss the solution proven to work:  contract it out.  I vaguely recall the City did for a while back in the early 90’s – maybe during Mayor Norm Coleman’s time?  I think they contracted to heavy equipment companies that did road construction in the Summer but sat idle all Winter.  We could hire them again.

I want to say it was West or South Saint Paul, or maybe a trial program on the West Side.  The city’s union employees claimed, unsurprisingly, that the private contractors were terrible at the job, and the program was ended.  “Cauterized” might be a better term.

Plus, St. Paul never plows alleys – residents band together to hire some guy with a Western plow on his pickup, which is good Winter work for landscapers.  They could each clean a few streets, too, and have them perfectly clean before the city crews even get to the shop.

A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, a plow on every block: now there’s a campaign slogan I could love.

That’s my block; one of our neighbors does plowing.  We each chip in $20 a winter – and he has to keep the alley plowed to get to work.  I think during the big blizzard in 2010 he may have made one of the side streets passable too…

  When I bought my last vehicle, I went shopping for a 4-wheel drive.  My in-laws asked me “Why do you need a 4-wheel drive, you live in St. Paul?” and I replied “I need a 4-wheel drive BECAUSE I live in St. Paul.”  Now that’s pathetic.

Joe Doakes

Saint Paul seems to be getting counterintuitively worse at clearing roads.  While last year was the worst – with even high-traffic streets remaining impassible sheets of glare ice for days after big storms – we haven’t had a real donnybrook of a storm yet, either.

The roads, even after last week’s modest storm, are like goat paths in the Bolivian Andes.

To:  Governor Dayton
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:   Remember all those pieces of paper you signed last spring?

Governor Dayton:

Yesterday, you told MPR News in re the new $90 million Senate Palace that Tom Bakk rammed through at the literal last possible moment of the last session…:

“I think the building itself is necessary … We’re talking about a project for the next century,” Dayton told reporters Wednesday. “But I think the price tag on it, and appearance of it, are a little high.”

Er, Governor Dayton?  You signed the appropriation into law.

Or at least we presume it was you, and not Carrie Lucking moving your hands.

That presumption looks weaker and weaker these days.

Dayton said he wants a more modest, less expensive version and planned to share his concerns soon with Senate leaders…The new building is needed to make up for the square footage lawmakers will lose once the renovation of the Capitol is complete, Bakk added. Under present Senate arrangements, the majority party is housed in the Capitol while the minority is housed in the State Office Building. Bringing Democrats and Republicans together under one roof is important, Bakk said.

Here’s a solution.  Mere blocks from the Capitol lies downtown Saint Paul.  It’s got a 30% vacancy rate – and I suspect that’s even higher in the gulch between Cedar and Jackson streets, where there is virtually nothing living (thanks, largely, to DFL policies).

Why not move the Senate into the old USBank building?  Or 375 Jackson?  The Hamm?   Alliance?  The Big Red One?

Or maybe Macy’s?   That’d seem…appropriate.

PS to Governor Dayton:  Nancy Pelosi was being just a little bit flippant, I think, when she said “you have to pass it to see what’s in it”.  It technically is your job to know what you’re signing into law.

In re the story about the six year old boy, Hunter Yelton, who was suspended from school and branded a “sexual harasser” for kissing another six year old girl:  the mother is going public saying that it was perfectly legitimate.

And I’ll allow that there are two sides to every story.

But if you bet money that the woman would have a hyphenated last name, and be a part of the educational-industrial complex, you may cash your chips.

(PS:  kids experiment with the idea of “affection” at that age.  They need to be firmly but gently set straight on what is and is not appropriate – not have their age-normal explorations branded a crime.  Some therapist is going to get rich off that poor kid when he’s gotta deal with his relationship issues someday).

To:  Liberals Who Pretend To Care About The Military when Veterans Benefits Are Threatened
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Put Up

All,

You know who you are.  You’re the liberals who screech like worn-out brake calipers when conservative political actions even obliquely threaten military or veterans benefits (which liberals barber about because it’s the one part of the military that’s the most like a social program).

So by all means, lefties; it’s time for you to screech.  Let your inner stuck cat howl like Jimi Hendrix’ Strat turned to 11.

That is all.

Do you remember the puddles of smug joy that the clacque of jabbering Ivy League frat-boy buffoons and sorority-sister buffoonettes that run our governent squirted when they signed Obamacare?

Byron York sure does – and he documents the descent from the End-Zone Happy Dance of March 2010 to the paranoid catatonia in the West Wing today:

[The] Democrats who gathered in the East Room of the White House for the signing ceremony could barely contain their joy. They cheered, they laughed, they shouted, they pumped their fists, they wouldn’t sit down. They chanted “Fired up — ready to go!” as they had at Obama campaign rallies. When the president recognized Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, the chant turned to “Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!”

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Pelosi, of course, would be swept out of the speakership in the Republican landslide a few months later — a result that was based, in part, on the voters’ unhappiness with Obamacare. And today, some of the other Democrats in the East Room are now afraid for their jobs — because of the voters’ unhappiness with Obamacare.

After an effusive introduction from Vice President Biden, Obama turned almost immediately to the task ahead. “It will take four years to implement fully many of these reforms,” he said, “because we need to implement them responsibly. We need to get this right.”

At the time, no one had any idea just how ill-prepared Obama and his administration were to actually do the job they set for themselves. Three years later, approaching an Oct. 1, 2013, deadline for the establishment of the Obamacare exchanges, the administration was still scrambling to finish even the most basic tasks. What followed was disaster.

Read the whole thing.

Show it to your friends who are losing their coverage.

Let them get angry.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My three-year-old granddaughter wanted a sucker. I said “No, you can’t eat a sucker in the car, you’ll make a mess.” She said “I won’t eat it, I just want to hold it.” Okay, fine, you can hold it.

Next thing I know, it’s unwrapped. “You’re not supposed to eat that.” “I’m not eating it, I just want to smell it.”

Pretty soon, her tongue is blue. “You’re not supposed to eat that.” “I’m not eating it, I only had one lick.”

Next thing I know, her face and hands are sticky, her coat is sticky, the car-seat is sticky and the sucker is stuck to the carpet on the floor. “I told you not to eat that, now look what you’ve done, you’ve made a mess.”

“It was an accident.”

Sure, it was a totally predictable outcome and any sensible person should have seen it coming. I never should have given in to her demand in the first place, I should have taken the sucker and let her wail and cry about it. That’s not the part that puzzles me.

What I want to know is: how did she manage to teach her technique to the Iranians so they could outwit John Kerry and Barak Obama, without me knowing about it?

Joe Doakes

Or did Kerry learn it from Jimmy Carter, who learned it from some other grandchild 35 years ago?

…of Cindy Yuille and Steven Forsythe, who were murdered a year ago at this minute (3:25PM Pacific Time) in the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Portland, Oregon by Jacob Tyler Roberts, an insane, delusional narcissist…

…and the many, perhaps dozens, of people whom Roberts couldn’t murder in the ensuing minutes and hours, because Nick Meli – a citizen with a carry permit and a .40 cal Glock 22 – made Roberts stop short, and then end his shooting spree by killing himself.  (We talked about  it yesterday). 

If you see Representative Heather Martens, Jane Kay, their PR flak Doug Grow, Michael Paymar, Alice Hausman or any of the Twin Cities’ other gun grabbers, please do me a favor and remind them – Nick Meli saved more lives in that moment than they and their groups of smug, sanctimonious, sputtering hamsters ever will.

…but this actually sums up the whole video game thing pretty well.

I almost missed this one in the scrum of this past few weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, when Representatives Paymar and Martens tried to jam down a ban on law-abiding citizens carrying their legally-permitted firearms in the Capitol complex, the Strib’s Abby Simons wrote the paper’s follow-up piece.

It ended with a quote from Representative Martens; like most of Martens’ statements, it reeks of crap from rhetorical stem to stern.  But I’ll emphasize the part I want to focus on today:

Heather Martens, executive director [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] of Protect Minnesota, an organization geared toward ending gun violence [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] and an advocate for the ban, said the intimidation happens when a loaded firearm is worn openly, as it was earlier this year during a hearing.

“There is no history of someone like that being a meaningful deterrent or being able to stop an attack,” she said.

If you read this blog,  you are smarter than that. 

John Lott showed how “someone like that” – multiplied by millions – have deterred hundreds of thousands of crimes in shall-issue states, as compared with discretionary or non-issue states (back when there were more of both). 

As to stopping those attacks?  Well, we’ve been through this before.  Here’s a partial list of attacks stopped by law-abiding, non-police, private citizens with legal firearms:

• The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, where a teacher grabbed a gun and stopped the two shooters.
• The Appalachian Law School shooting, where a would-be mass-murderer was stopped by a couple of armed students.
• A robbery that was devolving into a mass-shooting in Virginia was stopped by a CCW permittee.
• This episode in Texas recently
• An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
• The New Life Church shooting spree in Colorado Springs in 2007, ended by Jeanne Assam.
• This episode in Texas, where an armed man killed a mass shooter (and died, himself); it’s generally agreed he saved several lives in the process.
• An unknown “good samaritan” in South Minneapolis prevented himself from being murdered, two years ago. 
• A bouncer in Minneapolis prevented himself, and very possibly a number of other people, from being carved up like Christmas hams a few years ago. 
• Details are still sketchy, but it’s very likely one “VT” of Saint Paul prevented a murder – his – and possibly his friend’s a few weeks ago. 

If Heather Martens – or any of her supporters and employees – are talking, the rule of thumb is “assume they’re lying”.  Because they are.