To: Roger Goodell, President, The National Football League
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  It’s Apparently Not ThePlayers

Mr. Goodell,

You run a tax-exempt “non-profit” that is the biggest license to print money in the United States.

Your organization regularly loots city and state treasuries to build your venues – including mine.  You’ve crudely extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from our idiot governor and from a bunch of legislators who should have known better, using tactics that well befit the mobsters that are among the main beneficiaries of your profits.

Your athletes have turned, over the past thirty years, from role models into reprobates.

But you turned down this Super Bowl ad, from Daniel Firearms?

(To whom I’ll be giving free advertising, today and on Super Sunday, and likely more than a time or two in between)

I’m picturing the reasons.

Because you’re worried about violence:  So are we.  Especially when I go into a bar or restaurant where there might be NFL players present. (Yep, I used to DJ at the old Eddie Websters.  To be fair, back then the biggest danger was being on the same stretch of road as a Viking after closing time).

Because you’re worried about the game’s image:  Right.  Hey, is that Miley Cyrus’ ass at the halftime show?

Because you’re in bed with a bunch of liberal metro-area politicians:  Oh.  Right.

I think you might just be creating some baseball fans out there.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Put up the Christmas tree last weekend.  Some ornaments never go out of style.

Joe Doakes

Heh.

This coming Saturday, Minnesota’s self-appointed gun-grabber elite are going to try to squeedge some more juice out of waving the bloody shirt of Newtown:  

To Remember: A commemoration of the Sandy Hook school victims, and all victims of gun violence — 9:30 a.m. at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 1200 Marquette Ave., Minneapolis. To RSVP, click here. Space is limited. This event is co-sponsored by Moms Demand Action, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Organizing for Action.

They’ll then attempt to hold a meeting to promote more laws that would have had no effect on Newtown, or any other real-world gun violence. 

But there’s another anniversary this coming week; tomorrow, in fact.  And it deserves a memorial – because unlike every single thing proposed by “Protect” MN, Moms Want Action and the Felon Mayors, it actually saved lives. 

At around 3:25PM on December 11, 2012, Jacob Tyler Roberts walked into the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Portland Oregon.  He was wearing a ski mask, and carrying a stolen AR-15-pattern rifle with five magazines, a total of 150 rounds.  He donned the ski mask and carried the rifle openly; witnesses apparently thought it was a paintball outfit, and that the rifle was a toy.  One woman reportedly told Roberts to take off the mask – it looked “Creepy”.  Roberts didn’t respond. 

He walked to atrium in the middle of the mall, and started shooting.  He fired off his first magazine, killing two – Cindy Yuille, a 54 year old hospice nurse, and Steven Forsythe, a youth sports coach – and hitting15 year old Kristina Shevchenko in the chest (Shevchenko managed to walk out of the mall, and survived the incident). 

Then, as Roberts turned a corner and reloaded, he ran into Nick Meli, a citizen with a .40 caliber Glock 22 and an Oregon carry permit.  Meli drew – but didn’t shoot.  According to some stories, Meli froze; in others, he saw that there were civilians in the background that would be in danger if he missed.  Either is a fairly normal response under such conditions. 

But Roberts ran away.  He ducked into a JC Penney and ran into a storage corridor, where he pointed his rifle at Penneys employee Rok Sang Kim – but turned, ran down a stairwell, and shot himself. 

Drawn by reports of a mass shooting, dozens of ambulances turned out – but only Shevchenko was treated for any injuries.

The Lesson:  After the Columbine shooting – where a SWAT team waited outside the school for four hours before moving to engage the shooters – law enforcement went on a crash course of learning how to deal with mass shooters.  The lesson learned?  Don’t wait.  Get in, get at the shooter. 

It wasn’t about testosterone; examination of mass shooters showed that most of them are deeply narcissistic and intensely delusional.  In almost every case, the shootings were planned to a fine sheen, like a military operation, if the military were run by delusional people.

And that while the plans were intricate, the shooters’ mental state meant that any serious hiccup to the plan would send them off the rails.  And by “serious hiccup”, they meant “someone putting up meaningful resistance”. 

And so cops changed their tactics; rather than wait for SWAT, cops are now trained to get in, find the shooter, and put some lead on the target.   Because nothing disrupts a lunatic’s plan like having lead sailing past your head (to say nothing of through one’s chest). 

But here’s the little secret; it doesn’t have to be a cop doing the resisting.  History is full of examples of individual citizens putting up armed resistance to mass shooters, and ending the shootings:

• 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.
• Columbine itself was part of the lesson; it’s generally agreed that an armed sheriff’s deputy derailed the greater part of Harris and Klebold’s plans, firing off a couple of shots and deflecting the two shooters back to the library, fouling up their plans to set off bombs throughout the building and perhaps kill many, many more people. 

And of course the the Clackamas Mall shooting. 

Second-Guesses: There are those in the gun-grab movement who try to minimize, discount and ridicule the effect that an armed citizen can have in a mass shooting.  Some scoff that Roberts, and the shooter in the Colorado Springs episode, had jammed guns – as if clearing a jam is anything unusual (especially in an AR15) much less time-consuming to fix. 

But in both shootings, the jam was accompanied by a citizen facing the shooter down (and in Colorado Springs, seriously wounding him). 

The underlying point – mass shooters tend to abandon their plans when they’re faced with active, armed, potentially lethal resistance – stands.  Passive resistance – “lockdowns”, kevlar whiteboards – are better than nothing, provided the mass shooter allows them to be better than nothing. 

Consequences, Intended And Otherwise:  The Gun Control “Gun Safety” movement yaps a lot about “preventing gun violence” – while pushing policies that have never prevented and shall never prevent a single crime. 

And yet a year ago tomorrow, Nick Meli likely saved more lived that all of Michael Bloomberg, the Joyce Foundation, and Rep. Heather Martens’ efforts likely ever will, ever, for all eternity. 

And so for that, we should pay homage at 3:25PM tomorrow.

So according to a number of lawsuits working their way through the system right now, it’s OK to force bakers, florists, photographers and other such “creative” vendors who happen to be fundamentalist Christians to serve same-sex customers, on pain of being sued back to the stone age.

Very well.  By the same token…:

• A Jewish tattoo artist has no legal right to object to giving, say, a Nazi tattoo.
• A Native American baker had best not be making a fuss about making a cake with a Washington Redskins theme.
• A black photographer has no legal business objecting to doing glamour shots for Confederate re-enactors.

Remember; no hate!

(OK, I cribbed the idea from Amy Alkon)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

House extended ban on all-plastic guns for another 10 years.  Meaningless gesture.  Nobody gets shot with them, banning them won’t stop people from making them any more than banning cocaine stops people from using it.  Posturing to divert attention from real government failures in every other area.

My grandson has a plastic gun.  He carries it in a holster on his cowboy belt when he rides his hobby horse.  I wonder if Rep. Paymar is intimidated by that, too?

Joe Doakes

Heather Martens will no doubt make them a priority in the next session.

To prevent them from “intimidating” other kids.

You think I’m joking.  But if I’ve learned anything living in a city full of liberals with no fear of being held accountable, today’s sardonic jokes are tomorrow’s laws.

Or yesterday’s laws, in some cases.

There are two ways to look at Rep. Keith Ellison’s statement to a group of minimum wage protesters last week; emphasis added by me:

“We in Congress will try to raise the minimum wage. We got opponents on the other side of the aisle who say that there shouldn’t be no minimum wage. So, we are in difficulty fighting these guys.

“But, we know, at the executive level, an executive order can change the situation. We demand it, right now. Mr. President, sign the executive order. We demand this federal worker work reform, federal contractors. Give the pay raise, the livable, fair wage. Let’s do it now. I gave him a letter to this effect, yesterday.”

As Ellison walked off stage, the crowd chanted: “Sign the executive order!”

Either Ellison thinks Obama is a King, with absolute control over this country, or he has very little respect for his audience and thinks he can trick them into believing so. 

I’m going to lean toward “has very little respect, and thinks he can trick them”; that a graduate of a Jesuit high school, Wayne State University and a Tier 1 law school thinks saying things like “shouldn’t be no minimum wage” is authentic reeks of distilled cynicism.

Here’s Senator John Pedersen’s website running for the CD6 nomination.

Here’s my piece on Mandela.

And here’s Berg’s Law.

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.  We’ll be talking about Nelson Mandela, the Vikings stadium, the Vikings, and heaven only knows what else.
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is  back!  Brad’ll have Marty Seifert on the show.  “The Closer” airs from 1-3 Sundays!

(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!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This law purports to require society to be structured around the lowest common denominator but discriminates against people in comas, and those in an iron lung, and quadriplegics. Why are Canucks such haters?

Do they also require keys to be huge, like the key to a medieval church door, so frail hands get more leverage to turn them?

Is there no limit to societal engineering downward?

Joe Doakes

I’d suggest “dealing with crappy software” as one counterexample.

There’s little I can say about the passing of Nelson Mandela that many others haven’t already said better.

I watched a little of CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage yesterday – and was struck not so much by the elegiac coverage of Mandela and his life (deservedly so) as by the ninety seconds’ revisionist hate hate that the likes of Christiane Amanpour were directing back at Ronald Reagan.

Of course, history records the fact that Reagan opposed legislation that would have confronted the Pretoria government over apartheid. It was the only veto of his that the Democrats ever overrode.

The left has tried to portray this as racism, then and now.

That, of course, relies on hindsight.

The ANC was far from above terrorist activity, before and during Mandela’s imprisonment; his wife Winnie was fingered in numerous murders, kidnappings, assaults and other human rights violations, and she vocally endorsed the practice of “necklacing” political opponents (jamming a car tire around them and lighting them on fire – a particularly hideous form of premeditated murder).

If a group using rhetoric like the ANC’s were operating in the US today, being on Janet Napolitano’s watch list would be the least of their legal worries.

And the track record of Mandela’s contemporaries was pretty ghastly. Robert Mugabe’s revolt against white rule was successful – at the price of pretty much destroying Zimbabwe, which remains a less onerous place then North Korea today only because of the incompetence of the state’s agents. Other similar nationalists in places like Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Angola and the Congo/Zaire created vastly more trouble than they solved.

So Mandela’s greatest accomplishment was not that he toppled white rule – that was going to happen eventually one way or another, by war, ballot or negotiation. It was that he managed to do it without plunging South Africa into the nightmarish miasma of misery that’s attended the rule of virtually all of his contemporaries; that he and the transitional government he led accomplished the job of changing South Africa without descending into (much of) the orgy of retributive violence that greeted the assumption of black rule in Zimbabwe, or the wholesale destruction of economies, societies and uncounted masses of lives in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and a raft of other sub-Saharan nations.

Reagan, it is fair to say, got Mandela wrong. It is not, however, fair to say there wasn’t ample precedent for believing South Africa could have turned out much worse than it did.

And the post-apartheid story is not only still being written – it’s not that great for South Africa. The ANC’s post-Mandela leadership has proved corrupt and incompetent. As most of sub-Saharan Africa slowly claws it’s way to sustainability, South Africa is in economic decline. Hindsight in view of South Africa’s current reality makes Mandela look as much a hero of principled competence as the statuesque moral lesson that’s leading all the newscasts today.

Which is a great elegy for a historic hero; that his reality match his legend.

Read the rest of this entry »

In yet another Berg’s Seventh Law violation, Minnesota conservative activists noted that the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota – the attack-PR firm supported by the unions and Alita Messinger, which was trying to dig on Scott Honour for not releasing his tax information – hadn’t released its tax or donor information yet.

It’s worse still in Wisconsin; a liberal-controlled county launched a shakedown of Wisconsin conservative groups, in order to find out their donors to target them for future harassment.

And this seems to be a national pattern; liberal groups caterwauling about “lack of transparency” in conservative groups, while themselves keeping their donor lists secret:

Two weeks ago, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy kicked off a national campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous contributors to conservative groups in an effort to unseat the GOP governor here.

Now the group may have to answer embarrassing questions about its own finances….CMD lists no donors on its tax returns, but its website identifies numerous financial backers without any financial data. Several are highlighted in bold and labeled “current donors.” But one important name is missing: Schwab.

Read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama-care has more holes than Swiss cheese, the latest one being something called “risk corridors” that give DHS the power to pay extra to insurers who lost money on Obama-care policies.

No, those extra payments weren’t figured into the original cost, but it’s okay – the taxpayers can make up the difference.

In other words, corporate kickbacks will cover the unexpected costs of underwriting Democrat campaigns as the public catches on to the massive fraud the President played on them last election.  Donations from insurers to Democrats will be refunded via risk corridors, sort of like the incest that goes on between NPR and the DFL with Minnesota tax dollars.

Joe Doakes

Remember – Berg’s Seventh Law has no known exceptions. 

When you have people like Heather Martens – who has never made a substantive true statement in her entire career – and Michael Paymar saying they feel intimidated by gun owners bringing legaly-owned, permitted firearms into the Capitol, you may be certain it’s to draw attention away from the American Left’s inherently thuggish approach to, well, everything. 

And you’d be right to assume it. 

Otherwise, it’d be called “Berg’s Seventh Theory”. 

To:  All you folks “striking” for a $15/hour minimum wage
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Money from nothing

“Protesters”,

Today, you’ll be out and about around dozens of McDonalds, Taco Bells, WalMart and other low-wage employers.

I saw one of you on “Today” this morning; a cute, blonde, twenty-something single mother (what else?) and front-counter worker who notes for the camera that sometimes she has to choose between work clothes and bus fare.

I feel for you.  I do.  Twenty-odd years ago, I was in my twenties, had a couple of kids and a $7/hour job.  It was hard making ends meet.  Really, really hard. 

Of course, it was hard because of choices I’d made, not my diabolical employers.  I’d devoted myself to my first career – radio, which paid really badly, too – with a monastic intensity.  That career crashed – and it took me a few years to realize it. 

And after a year of floundering, I got the aforementioned $7/hour crummy job. 

Where I learned a couple of things; how to work in an office.  How to use a computer (that wasn’t something people were born doing back then).  How to work days instead of nights. 

I had made a few good choices, of course; when I was a teenager, I’d stayed in school and learned a few useful things, and kept it in my pants long enough to get through college (with a BA in English, which was no more a ticket to wealth then than it is today). 

Point being, that lousy $7/hour job was how I found my next job for $9/hour.  And thence got into technical writing.  And then into the career I have. 

And if that $7/hour job had gone away because legal document coders had decided to strike for $12 an hour, causing most of the crummy entry level jobs to be eliminated, where would I be today? 

The same place you’ll  be if they double the minimum wage for working the counter.

By the way, the woman on “Today” also parroted the same thing I’ve heard from ostensibly smarter liberals: without workers, there’d be no business.

That’s 180 degrees wrong, of course; without the business, there’d be no jobs. Don’t believe me?  Let’s try a quick thought experiment.  Find a vacant lot somewhere.  Put on a fast food uniform, and stand there saying “May I help you?”   Wait – where’s the burgers?  Where are the customers?  Where’s the counter and the till?  Where’s the building? 

What?  The SEIU goons behind the “strikes” never mentioned this?

Huh.

Robert Stacy McCain has the quote of the day from Twitter:

Obama has a web site that doesn’t work and drones that kill people. Amazon has a functioning web site and drones that deliver gifts.

Maybe that Galt fellow was onto something…

Hundreds of peoples’ battles with Healthcare.gov; in this case, getting switched to  higher-cost, higher-deductible plans, with no further questions asked:

If you have an insurance plan that isn’t compatible with the Affordable Care Act, your insurance company might be automatically rolling you into the plan “most similar” to your own.

For one Washington state resident interviewed by The Daily Caller, his new “Bronze” plan is 80 percent more expensive for him and his wife. His wife is paying $220 more and he’s paying $150 more with higher deductibles.

The insurers are sending letters to subscribers when their existing plans juuuuust didn’t provide all the goodies they didn’t want to pay for in the first place, telling them that it was the insurance company’s best guess, and to check in if they want to downgrade. 

“It’s a confusing thing for people. Most of the plans didn’t contain all the provisions that were under the law. We had no choice,” [Rachelle Cunningham strategic communications manager for insurance company RegenceBlueShield ] said. “We’re trying to make it clear for them.”

Fearless prediction:  not a few Obamacare defenders among the pundosphere will chalk this up to stupid customers.

One talk show host’s (with healthcare need’) battle with Healthcare.gov.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The old Sears Roebuck building on Lake Street in Minneapolis was converted into Midtown Global Market, an indoor bazaar.  It’s been losing money for years.  Now the mayor wants another $1.8 million to bail them out.

 

Look, Mr. Mayor:  if the project can’t make enough money to fund its own operations, it’s not a business: it’s a hobby.  The City has no business funding hobbies.

 

Granted, it’s Minneapolis, so I don’t care what they do in their own town.  But whatever Minneapolis does, St. Paul wants to do, like a younger brother who whines “How come I didn’t get a train?”  Throwing cold water on damn-foolishness is wise, no matter where it occurs.

 

Joe Doakes

That, and the bill is eventually going to be passed on to taxpayers in Moorhead, Wilmar and Lakeville (and any left in Saint Paul) via Local Government Aid.

Which is, of course, why we have Local Government Aid – so the citizens of Minneapolis can continue to be gulled into thinking their government is doing its job with the tax money they extract for life in the city.

Kevin Williamson concludes:

But the next time you hear a chorus of “Hooray, science!” from the Left, ask them why Barack Obama’s signature health-care program is going to recognize theworst sort of quackery and pseudoscience, with no more regard for the scientific record than the most fervid young-Earth creationist, swami, or snake-handler.

Williamson is writing about the fact that Obamacare specifically covers naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture, “sciences” with no more scientific basis than Christian prayer therapy (which is not covered, by the way).

Read the whole journey to the conclusion.

It’s going to be another light posting day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The number of Americans filing for unemployment dropped.  The headline makes this sound good but it’s actually not.

Look at it this way: suppose there are 100 people in the economy and 7 get laid off.  That’s an unemployment rate of 7%.

Now there are 93 people working.  If 7% get laid off again, that’s 6 more people out of work.  True – fewer people are getting laid off (only 6 instead of 7) but that’s because there are fewer people working to GET laid off.  The measure of a healthy economy is not how many people are out of work, it’s how many people who want to work, can find work.

The Labor Force Participation Rate has dropped so low that fewer than 63 people are working out of every 100 living in America.  The other 38 are out of work, out of unemployment benefits and have quit looking for work.  That’s the lowest percentage of working Americans since Jimmy Carter was in office.  That’s the tax base we’re expecting to pay for Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obama-care, student financial aid, foreign aid, farm aid, light rail and oh, yes, fighting wars in a dozen countries.

Joe Doakes

It is not necessary for people to return to work. It is necessary that the media make people think people are returning to work.

Thus racism.

A liberal of my acquaintance didn’t so much defend ObamaCare in Twitter as much as he spoke up for that can-do American talent for fixing things.

@[redacted]: @mitchpberg Just finished watching “Band of Brothers” for the umpteenth time.Ultimately Americans are good at making things work.

He followed up:

@[redacted]: @mitchpberg If we could produce a hundred thousand warplanes in a couple of years, why would you think we couldn’t make a website work?

We Americans are indeed good at fixing things. We fixed Europe – surely we can fix a website. Right?

Maybe. But if we’d fought WWII the way we’re socializing healthcare, we’d have drafted all the forty-to-sixty-year-olds, and then simultaneously invaded every nation on earth.

Let’s go to the primary sources:

Ambiguity?

Very busy week going on here.

Posting might be a little on the light side today and tomorrow.