Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Red Chinese are banning outdoor barbeques, supposedly to cut air pollution but you know it’s only a small step to banning them to Stop Global Warming.
Nobody tell Mayor Coleman.
I’m frankly amazed we don’t have public loudspeakers in Saint Paul broadcasting Dave Thune’s aphorisms.
The co-star of the book Hunt For Red October – which came out thirty years ago this coming year – was the USS Dallas, a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine.
(Yeah, I know – Ramius was the co-star, Jonesy, Ritter, yadda yadda. I got that. But in all of Clancy’s novels, technology was a co-star as well).
And the Dallas is being decommissioned:
Tom Clancy’s Cold War thriller made the Dallas famous, but in Navy circles it is better known for being the first attack submarine to carry a dry-deck shelter, which houses a vehicle for launching and recovering special operations forces.
“Dallas” earlier in her career
“Of all the submarines that would be finishing up their service life, there are a couple out there that people know by name, and Dallas is one of them,” said Capt. David A. Roberts, who commanded Dallas from 2007 to 2009. “It kind of adds to the moment. ‘The Hunt for Red October’ submarine we all know and love from the movies is going to be finishing up its service life soon.”
Via Dave Thul, an Army guy.
It’s only the SCSU Poll – a poll we’ve pretty well shredded in the past for its systematic bias toward the DFL.
But even that can’t varnish the fact that it’s a whole new campaign for the DFL in Minnesota. Approval ratings of everyone but Amy Klobuchar are in the toilet. How in the toilet?:
Minnesotans came down in the middle on Franken and Dayton, two Democrats who will stand for re-election next year. Franken got a 51-degree rating, while Dayton was at 49.
Respondents are feeling cooler toward Obama, rating him at 46 this year, down from 54 in SCSU’s 2012 survey.
And that’s just the warm-fuzzy poll. When you get into job approval, it’s even dodgier for the DFL incumbents:
Reflecting national polls, the president’s job performance ratings also dropped from last year and returned to 2010 levels. This year, 38 percent of Minnesotans rated him positively, compared to 47 percent in 2012.
For Dayton, less than half the respondents (44 percent) gave him positive marks this year, while a slight majority (52 percent) rated him negatively.
Franken had a low approval score of 39 percent, while 57 percent approved of Klobuchar’s performance.
The media will, of course, do their best to rehabilitate the DFL, Dayton and Franken over the next 11 months. But they’ve got their work cut out for them.
It was one of the stories that got no play last session, in spite of the fact because it highlights the bizarre schizophrenia of using politics to allocate human capital, but while on the one hand AFSCME was working to unionize home-child-care providers – who are independent contractors and don’t have “management” – it was instituting full-day kindergarten, reducing the number of kids who’d be in daycare at all.
Which wasn’t entirely incongruous, if you think about it; to the DFL, racket money from daycare providers and union dues from a doubling of Kindergarten teachers are both just revenue streams.
But this?
The final rule, for the most part, confirmed a proposed rule, issued in July, which will cut the Medicare home health benefit by $22 billion over the next four years.
“Congress asked [Center for Medicaid Services],” Halamandaris said, “to do a comprehensive evaluation of the home health benefit, to isolate what works and what needs improvement, how to increase access and efficiency, and how to reduce costs while improving the quality of care. CMS did none of this. Instead, all they did was look to impose the largest possible cut —3.5 percent a year — on the Medicare home health benefit. This adds up to 14 percent over the next four years, or a total of $22 billion.”
The National Association for Home Care & Hospice has produced studies showing that the Medicare home health benefit has already endured more than its fair share of cuts. The benefit has been cut a disproportionate $78 billion since 2009. Add in the newly imposed cut and $100 billion in cuts will have been taken from the most popular and most-needed Medicare program. And as a result of these cuts by the end of 2017, 75 percent of Medicare-certified agencies will be forced under water with profit margins of zero or less.
“The clear conclusion is that saving money is more important to CMS than serving those who are so sick they cannot leave home without assistance,” Halamandaris pointed out. “It is obvious that they turned a deaf ear to our pleas on behalf of aged, infirm, disabled, and dying Americans.”
In other words, while the SEIU was working calling in markers with the DFL to unionize home-care workers, President Obama was working to shut the industry down completely.
Good job, guys.
One of “Protect” MN’s most insidious lies is that the Second Amendment and Gun Rights are affectations of white suburban males.
(I’m a honky, all right, but I do live in the city. Your stereotype is null and void. But we knew that).
But the roots of gun control are, and have always been, utterly and corrosively racist.
This video – “No Guns for Negroes” – documents the racist roots of gun control. It’s about twenty minutes, and it’s well worth the watch.
More than that? It shows the effect that armed blacks had in deterring Klan violence. The “Deacons of Defense” were an organized group of blacks, mostly veterans, who existed to deter Klan attacks against civil rights activities and black communities in the sixites. The media – in the bag as most of them are for gun control – have pretty much buried that story.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Heather Martins talking. Lying. Same thing.
“There is no history of someone like that being a meaningful deterrent or being able to stop an attack,” she said. Seriously?
Someone should inform Abby Simons, the Star Tribune journalist who wrote the article, of some facts about permitted carry holders stopping crime, just for the variety of citing actual truth for a change.
It strikes me: Rep. Paymar says the presence of armed citizens in the legislative chamber intimidates legislators. Pistols carried openly are intimidating. Really? All of them? How about when cops testify while in uniform, openly carrying their firearms, is that intimidating? If so, then you should disarm everybody in the hearing room, which you’re not going to do because there’d be nobody to provide protection.
If openly carried pistols don’t intimidate you on a policeman’s belt, why not? Cops shoot far more innocent people every year than permitted carry holders. Why are pistols carried openly on cops’ belts not intimidating? Because you trust cops implicitly but not citizens? Why is that . . . and what does it say about your attitude toward the people you’re supposed to be representing?
Joe Doakes
If intellectual honesty and logical consistency were gasoline, Heather Martens couldn’t drive around the inside of a Cheerio.
Here’s Larry Jacobs’ piece in the NYTimes. I may be posting a refutation in coming weeks if time permits…
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!
(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:
Join us!
Tomorrow, a couple of great interviews on the Northern Alliance Radio Network’s “Headliner” Edition:
First – I’ll be talking with GOP gubernatorial candidate Marty Seifert.
Then – former state rep. Jim Knoblauch will talk about his suit to block the new DFL Party Palace – aka the exquisitely-expensive Senate Office Building project that the DFL legislature jammed down in the middle of the night when nobody was looking, for a eight-to-nine-digit bill.
Remember last year, when Representatives Michael Paymar, Heather Martens and Alice “the Phantom” Hausman copied and pasted gun-grab laws from New York, Colorado and California and tried to jam them down in the Legislature?
The orcs insisted “Nobody’s coming to take the guns of the law-abiding!”
We Real Americans knew better. We always do.
And in New York, it’s happening even as we speak:
Of course, not one incident of “violence” will be prevented. The criminals won’t be turning anything in.
But you – provided you’re a Real American – know that. The orcs? Heather Martens, Jane Kay, Michael Paymar?
Their ends justify their means.
And had Minnesota’s Real Americans not staged a cataclysmic turnout last spring, we could have had virtually the same law.
And if we take our eye off the ball in the coming session, we still could.
Especially when it comes from the “Violence Policy Center”:
Or Larry Jacobs.
A Colorado Democrat Senator, faced with imminent humiliation at the polls for supporting Colorado’s wave of New-York-style gun regulations, jumped before she was pushed.
It wasn’t cowardice per se – more like Democrats manipulating the rules to stay in power:
Under Colorado law, Hudak’s successor will be a member of her own party.
Hudak’s replacement would serve in the upcoming legislative session but would have to run for the seat in November 2014 to keep it.
Hudak had done more than just infuriate the pro-rights crowd:
Conventional wisdom said Hudak couldn’t survive a recall: She had won re-election in 2012 by less than 600 votes, and her inartful questioning of a rape victim during a hearing on one gun bill had made her a national target of Second Amendment activists.
It wasn’t “inartful questioning” – Hudak’s thuggish, insensitive and ignorant grilling of rape victim Amanda Collins was factually-vacant enough to have come straight from Heather Martens’ lips – but I have to believe even Martens wouldn’t be stupid enough to have done what Hudak did. It even earned the scorn of the famously liberal Denver Post (although Hudak’s non-apology apology to Collins, arrogant and condescending enough to deserve being put on T-shirts by Second Amendment rights activists, didn’t earn specific condemnation).
In her resignation speech, Hudak said one of her key goals in resigning was to protect the gun-control legislation she and her fellow orcs passed last session.
Finishing off that seat is another item on the to-do list for second amendment human rights activists for next fall.
We’ve got a few of those in Minnesota. Hopefully the GOP in Albert Lea has a candidate rarin’ to go to oust Shannon Savick…
Video taken from a “Sign Up For Obamacare” event yesterday evening.
Nah, it was WalMart.
Probably.
For years, I’ve been saying – half-jokingly – that gays wouldn’t achieve real equality until we saw a married gay couple on Cops, with a drunk guy in a husband-beater T-shirt being bundled into a cruiser outside a battered trailer in a ratty southern trailer park while his husband nursed a black eye and cried and yelled “I love you, Manfred! I’ll be down to bail you out!”
But for the absence of a camera crew, a presumed dearth of ironic redneck-to-gay cross-cultural switcheroos and of course a tragic end result, we almost got there.
Lest I flirt further with insensitivity, I do in fact send my condolences to all involved.
And I am.
I am thankful, for starters, that someone posted Linda Thompson’s version. Dave Swarbrick’s nasal delivery would put me off my thanksgiving meal…
I may make it into a lawn sign.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Posting will be light-ish tomorrow.
They’re not spying on us.
They’re scouring the nation for evidence of any form of Obamcare succes story.
Soon, they’ll be turning the Hubble Telescope toward the US…
The Select Committee on Capitol Security met yesterday.
They moved to hire some new State Patrol and rent-a-cops. There wasn’t a whole lot of controversy there, although Representative Woodard and Senator Ingebrigtsen noted that security in the parts of the Capitol that need it is already pretty good.
But the reason reason people paid attention to yesterday’s meeting was because Rep. Michael Paymar intended to push his proposal to ban legally-carried firearms in Capitol complex buildings (the Capitol, the State Office Building and the Judicial building).
More than 800 Minnesotans have filed with the DPS to indicate that they have a permit to carry a firearm and may bring their pistol into the Capitol. Originally, the draft recommendation would have required gun owners to update that notification annually; at Ingebrigtsen’s urging, that timeframe was adjusted to renewing the notification every five years, and was adopted by the committee.
In other words, you renew your notification as often as you renew your permit. Truth be told, I already thought I had to do that…
…if, hypothetically, I had a carry permit and desired to carry at the Capitol.
After that bit of fairly sensible legislation, it was looney-time:
Paymar argued that the fact that the Capitol had so far been spared any violent altercations was not evidence that current safety measures are adequate.
“Having a ‘cross your fingers’ kind of policy coming out of this entity, which is charged with making recommendations about public safety on the Capitol complex, to me, is irresponsible,” said Paymar, who chairs the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee.
Mijnnesota’s carry-permit holders are the single constituency in Minnesota least likely to cause a problem , at the Capitol or anywhere else. Ever Period.
No, seriously – Minnesotans at large commit murder at the rate a little over 2 per 100,000 people per year. There’s been one unjustified homicide by a carry-permittee in ten years; the math breaks down to .1/5 million Minnesotans/year, or .002/100,000 annually. That’s right around three orders of magnitude safer.
Mr. Paymar would more aptly worry about one of his Saint Paul constituents – perhaps the many supporters of terrorist-accomplice Kathleen Soliah, who live in Paymar’s neighborhood and tacitly condoned her activities in the seventies – freaking out and killing people in the Capitol than the state’s legal carry permittees.
No, this wasn’t done because of any danger, real or perceived or even fabricated. This was done to try to try to salvage at least a smidgen of “Protect” MN’s narrative from this past session – the addlepated notion that legislators were “intimidated” by gun owners who carried openly and legally during last spring’s epic waste of taxpayer time hearings on Rep. Paymar, Hausman and Martens’ various gun grab bills. The staff at Capitol Security refute that idea with prejudice; ask them for yourself.
Emphasis added in this next bit:
Ingebrigtsen pushed back, and pointed out that Gov. Mark Dayton had already said publicly he does not favor a move to ban firearms in the Capitol.
“We’ve also got the governor saying the same thing,” Ingebrigtsen said. “[Dayton] doesn’t see anything wrong with law-abiding citizens carrying handguns on the Capitol complex.”
The vote fell, 2-2 (ties are counted as defeats); Lt. Governor Yvonne Prettner Solon (there’s a trivia question for you) and Paymar voted for it, Ingebrigtsen and Woodard voted nay, SCOM justice Lori Gildea abstained (she might have to hear a court case on the issue someday…)
…and Ann Rest, a DFL Senator from Plymouth who is as electorally bulletproof as an Armored Humvee, didn’t show up.
Don’t think for a moment that was an accident. Even safe DFLers are nervous about the Metrocrats’ insane obsession with disarming the law-abiding.
Not that they’re going to stop them.
No, that’s our job. At the ballot box.
(NOTE TO DFL LEGISLATORS: If I had a carry permit, I doubt I’d ever carry openly. It’s not my style. But feel free to be intimidated – not by any gun I’d hypothetically carry, but by the fact that I can shred through every single actual factual assertion that Heather Martens and Richard Carlbom make about the gun control issue like a riding mower going through a daisy patch, and not break a sweat. Be intimdated by the fact that if either Martens or Carlbom debated me, or any of 500 other gun rights advocates, in a face to face, open debate, I’d fold them up like origami swans and make them scamper away like scared bunnies. Be intimidated by the fact that I, myself, have convinced liberal Democrats that you are wrong, and I’m just getting started. Ignore any gun I might hypothetically be carrying. Be intimidated by the weapon between my ears. On this issue, your side is carrying a pellet pistol; I’ve got a .44 Magnum, and I don’t mean one of those wimpy four inch barrels, either)
It’s a lazy, pre-holiday blogging day where it’s easier to post videos than actually write anything.
Don’t judge me.
Anyway – I loved this one:
This video – “And I Carry” – has been making the long-overdue rounds:
(Technical note: I don’t endorse carrying in one’s book bag. Too easy to steal…)
The surprising part? I actually found it on the MPR News site.
The local establishment media have been flogging a article in the NYTimes in which Professor Larry Jacobs – the most over-quoted person in Twin Cities media, although Professor David Schultz is breathing hard on his heels – claims “progressive” Minnesota’s outlook is better than “conservative” Wisconsin’s.
I was going to tackle it – but Jeff Peil already did, and did it just fine.
Read the whole thing – but here’s the money quote:
So what does it matter? The whole point of Jacobs’ article is that Minnesota and Wisconsin are perfect little laboratories to measure the consequences of completely opposite policies. The only problem is that they are not. What’s worse is that the consequences he cites are so cherry-picked, that Politifact, renowned in conservative circles for being vehemently left-leaning, actually pre-empted Jacobs’ drivel a couple of months ago. Politifact called it a half-truth to state that Minnesota is faring better than Wisconsin in important areas. But, you see, that does not matter to the likes of Jacobs or the Times. Walker must be taken down – sound reasoning and intellectually honest analysis is irrelevant.
The truth is that it is way too soon to see what differences, if any, exist between liberal and conservative rule. Mark Dayton spent much of his term battling a Republican majority, which, like its federal counterpart, shut the government down. Being as generous as I can, he has had about nine months to enact his policies. Similarly, Scott Walker spent the majority of his term battling a recall effort which ended up with his party losing control of one chamber of the legislature.
Economies take time to change – but the parade of suck has begun in Minnesota.
Jimmy Kimmel:
“The only time President Obama comes to LA for money. He’s like the college student who only comes home to do his laundry and steal leftovers….”
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Norwegian Army is having Meatless Mondays, to fight Global Warming. I’d think Norway would Welcome global warming.
In unrelated news, doctors are puzzled why tofu burger franchises can’t make enough money to pay the lease payments at airports, especially in the Deep South. No doubt they need federal subsidies.
Joe Doakes
Maybe they should build them in Norway instead…?
Lighten up, Francis.
Most observers, Catholic or not, recognized the sea-change brought about by Pope Francis I. An Argentinian Cardinal, Francis supposed a move left for the Catholic Church from the days of Pope Benedict XVI and John Paul II. While Francis hasn’t shocked many with his bending on social issues, his most boisterous attacks have been on economic issues – a move leftward he restated by declaring “unfettered capitalism” a “new tyranny.”
The move isn’t exactly unprecedented. Pope Benedict XVI voiced deep reservations about modern capitalism. In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Benedict reiterated “progressive” stances in areas of public unions and economic redistribution; areas often overshadowed within the media by Benedict’s undoubted commitment to baroque liturgies and traditional moral norms. The election of Pope Francis caused everyone from full-time Vaticanologists to the average Catholic in the pew to recognize a shift, a change of emphasis and style, and a laser-like focus on poverty from the new pope. Read the rest of this entry »
Obamacare will have “death panels”, just like Sarah Palin said.
This according to Ted Nugent:
“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
Oh, they’re not called “Death Panels” – but, as we discussed in the past, HMOs are built around the idea of “Case Management”, which means “make sure the cost of the care is commensurate with the benefit received”. Don’t don’t transplant the liver of a 21 year old into a 70 year old alcoholic diabetic who’s already past their life expectancy if there’s a 30 year old who’d benefit more, for an extreme example.
And no, it wasn’t Ted Nugent. It was that noted conservative tool Mark Halperin.
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